A Research On The Effects Of Glossing Formats On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition In Junior High School Students' Reading Comprehension

Vocabulary,as the basic component of sentences and articles,is not only the key in language learning,but also one of the difficulties for learners.Thus,researchers and scholars have shown a keen interest in finding out the most effective way for students to learn new words.In addition to the traditional vocabulary teaching,the incidental vocabulary acquisition(IVA)has aroused widespread concern among linguists and scholars since it was firstly proposed by Nagy,Herman and Anderson in1985.By then,it is generally accepted that the extensive reading is an efficient way to enlarge learners' vocabulary.However,because of the insufficient contextual cues in the text,learning new words from contexts while focusing on reading is considered difficult for students,especially for beginners.The gloss,as an intentional stimuli,has been proven to be an effective way for facilitating the IVA as well as enhancing reading comprehensions.Adding Glosses for unknown English words in reading materials is a rather common practice in China,nevertheless,there are limited empirical studies on the formats of glosses in reading comprehensions and less studies have investigated the effects of different formats of glosses in middle school students' reading comprehension.Based on the Input Hypothesis,the Depth of Processing Theory and the Involvement Load Hypothesis,this paper aims to explore the effects of four different formats of glosses(including single Chinese glosses,single English glosses,multiple-choice Chinese glosses and multiple-choice English glosses)on IVA in junior high school students' reading comprehension.180 students in six parallelclasses from Grade Seven to Grade Nine were selected as the research subjects.According to their grades,they were divided into three groups.Subjects within the same group received the same two reading comprehensions and two vocabulary tests.Finally,the data were statistically analyzed by SPSS17.0 software,and the following conclusions were obtained: 1)Junior high school students are able to acquire vocabulary incidentally through reading comprehensions.2)The score of the multiple-choice Chinese gloss is the highest in the instant test and the score of the single Chinese gloss is the highest in the delayed test.(3)From Grade Seven to Grade Nine,the effect of IVA fluctuates with grades.The higher the grade is,and the better the effect of IVA is.In the view of this,English teachers should encourage and guide students to acquire vocabulary through reading.And English reading comprehension writers should pay attention to the important role of formats of glosses and try to annotate new words by using different formats.