The Effects Of Translation Tasks On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition By Chinese Graduates

Vocabulary,which is an essential component in language,plays an important role in the field of second language(L2)acquisition.It is acknowledged that L2 learners are often impeded by a large amount of unfamiliar words in L2 acquisition.Incidental vocabulary acquisition(IVA),as one of the important approaches to vocabulary acquisition,has become a hot topic in the study of L2 vocabulary acquisition.To date,most studies have focused on IVA in reading,whereas studies on IVA in listening,speaking and writing are relatively fewer(???,2003;??,???,2005).And studies on IVA in translation,for particular,remain even scarcer.However,translation is an important aid for L2 IVA(Hulstijn,1993;??,2002;Folse,2004;Cook,2010).In addition,to date,studies on incidental vocabulary acquisition mainly investigated learners'receptive knowledge of vocabulary,with their productive knowledge of vocabulary neglected.The present study aims to investigate the effects of translation tasks on IVA.To be specific,it aims to find out which translation task(English-Chinese vs.Chinese-English translation task)is more effective in Chinese graduates' incidental vocabulary acquisition.And further it intends to explore whether the effects of translation tasks differ in terms of receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge.It also aims to investigate whether the translation tasks have delayed effects on learners' retention of words.The participants were divided into two groups: the E-C translation group and the C-E translation group,and they were asked to complete the immediate and delayed IVA post-tests after their respective translation tasks.There are three major findings of the present study.Firstly,both translation tasks have positive effects on learners' incidental vocabulary acquisition.And the C-E translation task is significantly more effective than E-C translation task on learners' overall vocabulary gains.Secondly,C-E translation task generated significantly more acquisition of productive vocabulary knowledge than E-C translation task.In E-C translation group,more receptive vocabulary knowledge was acquired than productive vocabulary knowledge.Thirdly,with the elapse of time,recall of words in both groups decayed significantly.However,although decay occurred in both translation tasks,learners still achieved significantly more overall vocabulary gains in C-E translation task than those in E-C translation task in the delayed IVA test.With regard to the retention of different depth of vocabulary knowledge,the superiority acquisition of productive vocabulary knowledge for C-E translation task over E-C translation task disappeared over time.