A Study Of The Effects Of Different Types Of Glosses On English Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Of Junior Middle School Students

Glosses generally refer to simple explanations or definitions of the unknown words in reading,which can help learners understand the unknown words and thus promote reading.Recently,the study of the effects of different types of glosses on incidental vocabulary’ acquisition in reading has attracted more and more attention from researchers at home and abroad.And lots of research indicates that multimodal glosses are more effective than monomodal glosses on incidental vocabulary acquisition.However,there is still no consensus of which kind of gloss is most effective on incidental vocabulary acquisition in reading.In view of this,on the basis of Dual Coding Theory and Cognitive Load Theory,this study explores the effects of three different types of glosses on incidental vocabulary acquisition,trying to answer the following two questions:(1)What are the effects of textual glosses,pictorial glosses and text-picture glosses on the recall of the form of the target words?(2)What are the effects of textual glosses,pictorial glosses and text-picture glosses on the recognition of the meaning of the target words?The participants of this study were 45 students from Grade Two of a junior middle school,and they were randomly divided into three groups:textual glosses,pictorial glosses and text-picture glosses.The final English test and the results of vocabulary size test showed that the English proficiency and vocabulary size of the three groups were basically the same.In addition,in order to determine the reading material of the experiment,a related pilot study and a semi-structured interview were conducted.The target words in the reading material were glossed with textual glosses,pictorial glosses and text-picture glosses respectively by computer.The subjects were not told the vocabulary test before-completing the reading comprehension.When the reading comprehension was completed,the subjects were divided into groups to take part in the immediate vocabulary test.After two weeks,the delayed vocabulary test was completed.Findings are as follows:(1)Text-picture glosses are more effective than textual and pictorial glosses on the recall of the form of the target words.Meanwhile,textual glosses are better than pictorial glosses,and there exist significant differences among the three types of glosses;(2)Text-picture glosses are better than both textual glosses and pictorial glosses at the recognition of the meaning of the target words.At the same time,textual glosses are better than pictorial glosses,but there are no significant differences among the three types of glosses.The results enrich the research on the field of glosses and English incidental vocabulary acquisition,and further verify that multimodal glosses are more effective than monomodal glosses on incidental vocabulary acquisition.Under the condition of multimodal,image coding and verbal coding wake up the non-verbal memory code and verbal memory code respectively,as well as learners use two systems to encode,so the learning effect is better than monomodal.This study explores the effects of three different types of glosses on English incidental vocabulary acquisition of junior middle school students,which supplies guidance for teachers to change the traditional methods of vocabulary teaching.But due to small samples and short interval,the experiment needs to be further optimized.