Effects Of Glossing Forms On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition In Reading At Senior High School

It is universally believed that vocabulary is the foundation of language learning,which exerts a direct impact on learners,language proficiency.Quite a few foreign and domestic researchers have carried out plenty of studies to find out effective ways of enlarging learners' vocabulary size.In 1985,Nagy,Herman and Anderson first put forward the concept of incidental vocabulary acquisition(IVA)which advocates acquiring vocabulary as a by-product while conducting other learning activities.The proposal of this theory stimulated the attention and interests of many researchers who discovered that IVA could be achieved through such learning activities as listening,reading,writing and speaking but the effect of IVA in reading is the most obvious.Nevertheless,others found that unknown words in reading passage have negative influence on learners' IVA and reading comprehension.In this case,glossing on unknown words was adopted as a common solution.Different researchers conducted various studies on the effects of different glossing forms on IVA in reading from diverse perspectives,including language of gloss,type of gloss,mode of gloss as well as position of gloss.However,most of them focus on only one aspect of glossing forms and seldom combine them to explore their effects on IVA.Furthermore,the effects of different glossing forms on IVA in reading are still controversial and thus require further studies.Additionally,most studies focus on advanced language learners while low-intermediate learners,like high school students are seldom chosen as the subjects.Consequently,on the basis of the previous studies,the author combined language of gloss and type of gloss to get four forms of gloss,including single Chinese gloss,Chinese multiple-choice gloss,single English gloss and English multiple-choice gloss.Meanwhile,high school students were selected as the subjects to find the most effective one on incidental vocabulary acquisition and retention at the stage of high school.Based on the Noticing Theory Hypothesis,Comprehensible Input Hypothesis,Depth of Processing Hypothesis,Involvement Load Hypothesis and the Revised Hierarchical Model,this thesis is conducted to answer three questions displayed as follows.(1)What is the effect of high school students' 2,000 vocabulary size on IVA in reading?(2)Among Chinese single gloss,English single gloss,Chinese multiple-choice gloss and English multiple-choice gloss,which one is the most effective on IVA in reading in the immediate vocabulary test?(3)Among Chinese single gloss,English single gloss,Chinese multiple-choice gloss and English multiple-choice gloss,which one is the most effective on the retention of target words in the delayed vocabulary test?To answer the three research questions,experimental research was applied in this research.In this experiment,120 senior two students with a vocabulary size of 2,000 were divided into four groups.They were required to read the same reading passage with four different glossing forms respectively.After reading,they were asked to finish a reading comprehension test as well as an unexpected vocabulary test so as to examine the effects of students' acquisition under four glossing forms.One week later,a delayed vocabulary test was conducted in order to find out the most effective glossing form in vocabulary retention.After the experiment,all the collected data were processed and analyzed.There were three major findings of this thesis.In the first place,high school students with a vocabulary size of 2,000 could also acquire vocabulary incidentally.Besides,single Chinese gloss was found to be the most effective glossing form in the immediate vocabulary test.Last but not least,under the condition of Chinese multiple-choice gloss,students had the best performance in the vocabulary retention of the target words.All in all,this research is expected to generate insight for English teachers and reading material editors.As for English teachers,they are expected to attach greater importance to IVA and select reading materials with proper glossing forms based on students' language level.Meanwhile,as for reading materials editors,they could select and adjust the content and the difficulty level of the reading materials for students by making good use of glossing forms.