An Experimental Study Of The Influences Of Authentic Reading Materials Oin English Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition In Senior High Schools

Vocabulary,as one of the essential components that affects learner's language learning,is closely related to learners' English output,such as reading,writing and speaking.It takes up a high portion in reading comprehension,and its importance is highlighted both in the requirement of vocabulary size in college entrance exam and New Curriculum.However,due to exam-oriented teaching,traditional vocabulary teaching approach still plays an important role in the senior high school that the author worked during the internship,which is to read repeatedly after the recorder or the teacher to memorize the words by rote.In this way,the learning of vocabulary bores the learners and has received negative results.How to help language learners effectively learn the vocabulary has long been the focus of linguists' research.In recent years,incidental vocabulary acquisition hypothesis has been proposed in the field of second language acquisition.It states that learners can learn vocabulary incidentally through self-reading.However,what kind of reading materials has a prominent effect is still in lack of supporting evidence.At the same time,in modern times,the new curriculum revolution advocates the development of diversified teaching materials,and authentic materials is one of the recommended sources.To compare the effects of authentic materials with that of non-authentic materials on the incidental vocabulary learning,schema theory,Krashen's input hypothesis,and the incidental vocabulary acquisition hypothesis are referred to as a theoretical framework,and then a comparative experiment is conducted between two parallel classes in order to verify two hypotheses: 1)authentic materials affect learners' reading activities;2)there are significantly different effects between the authentic materials and non-authentic materials on incidental vocabulary acquisition.The two parallel classes are Class 3 and Class 4 in Senior 2 from Peiying Senior High School.Class 3 is the Control Group(CG)while Class 4 is the Experimental Group(EG).Non-authentic reading materials are distributed to CG,while authentic ones to EG.To reduce possible variables that may influence the results of the study,the vocabulary size of the two groups is examined by a vocabulary size test written by Nation who is a Zelanian expert in vocabulary study.No significant difference is found between them after analyzing the data through SPSS.Meanwhile,the size of unknown words of both types of materials is controlled within 5% to ensure the chosen materials are comprehensible.In this step,the selected materials are run through an online vocabulary profiler(developed by Nation at the very beginning)to make sure that at least 90% of the words in the texts are within the subjects' vocabulary size level.At the same time,Chinese annotations are added right after the unknown words that are not target ones but will influence the subjects' comprehensibility.In this way,the size of unknown words is well controlled.Finally,the topic and content of both types should be as similar as possible.To do this,the author has to read through all the chosen materials.According to the definition of authentic material: those materials written for meaningful interaction instead of pedagogical purpose are authentic texts.Otherwise they are non-authentic ones,appropriate authentic and non-authentic reading materials are selected.During the reading experiment,the independent variable-the reading materials,is strictly controlled to make sure that CG can only have access to non-authentic reading materials and EG can only have access to authentic ones.After research,data and information are collected from pretest,posttest,questionnaires and an interview.No remarkable difference is found in either the average vocabulary size in the vocabulary size test or vocabulary knowledge of target words in the pretest between the two groups before research,meanwhile,the attitudes towards newspaper reading and vocabulary learning strategies are more or less the same before experiment.However,after the research,most students in EG show great interest in authentic reading materials,their motivation is activated,what's more,most of them make an improvement in their words inference strategies as well.Furthermore,the overall score of vocabulary acquisition and retention in authentic reading group is substantially higher than that in non-authentic reading group.The null hypotheses are therefore proved.