An Empirical Study Of Narrow Reading On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition In Senior High School

Language learning requires a lot of input,reading is one of the most important ways to language input.Therefore,English reading plays an important role in senior high school English teaching.It is the most important way to absorb and acquire language information.It helps expand students' vocabulary,prepare for language output.Reading is inextricably linked to vocabulary.As an important way of incidental vocabulary acquisition,reading has attracted more and more scholars' attention.Vocabulary acquisition by reading has become an important part of teaching and learning.However,different reading modes have different effects on incidental vocabulary acquisition,and the choice of reading style is particularly important.Based on schema theory,relevance theory and affective filtering hypothesis,Krashen proposed narrow reading.That is to say,the learner uses the repetition of target vocabulary,grammar,cross-cultural background knowledge,etc.to deepen the understanding of the theme or genre of articles,improve reading skills,and promote language acquisition by reading the same theme,style,genre,theme or multiple works of the same writer over a period of time.So how can we acquire vocabulary through narrow reading and apply it flexibly in different contexts?This paper applies narrow reading in English extracurricular reading of senior high school to explore the influence of narrow reading on incidental vocabulary acquisition.The main discussions are as follows:(1)What is the current situation of incidental vocabulary acquisition in English extracurricular reading of senior high school?(2)What is the influence of narrow reading on English receptive incidental vocabulary acquisition and retention in senior high school?(3)What is the influence of narrow reading on English productive incidental vocabulary acquisition and retention in senior high school?In this study,102 students from two parallel classes were selected as the research objects in a senior high school in Jincheng for one semester.The experimental class adoptedthe method of narrow reading in extracurricular reading training.The control class adopted the traditional reading training method.The teacher selects 48 English articles as reading materials.There are 8 topics,6 articles per topic,and 4 target words were selected for each article that are two receptive vocabularies and two productive vocabularies.Fortnight cycle is a reading cycle.Each cycle teacher issued reading materials to students,teacher issued one topic article at a time in the experimental class,while the control class are distributed six articles selected randomly by the teachers.At the end of each reading cycle,two classes were tested simultaneously.After the experiment,two classes were given vocabulary delay test.The author collected the experimental data by questionnaire and English vocabulary acquisition test.The data were analyzed by SPSS.17 and Excel.The experimental results show that:The current situation of English extracurricular reading in senor high school is not very optimistic.In the process of extracurricular reading,the students' reading purpose is not clear,but they just simply finish the reading task,do not pay too much attention to the vocabulary.They do not connect the extracurricular reading with vocabulary acquisition,and can not fully play the role of extracurricular reading.For receptive vocabulary,there are significant differences between the experimental class and the control class in the acquisition and retention tests,and the results of the experimental class are significantly better than those of the control class.It shows that narrow reading can help students to grasp the meaning of words and improve their receptive vocabulary acquisition level.For the productive vocabulary,both the experimental class and the control class are not satisfactory in the acquisition and maintenance of the test,which is because the students do not practice the relevant usage of the vocabulary too much in the process of extracurricular reading.However,there are still significant differences between the two classes in vocabulary acquisition and retention tests,and the students in the experimental class are better than those in the control class.It shows that narrow reading can help students to master the relevant usage of vocabulary to a certain extent and help students acquire productive vocabulary more effectively.Therefore,comparing with the traditional reading training,narrow reading is more helpful to improve students' English vocabulary acquisition and retention.Teachers can take narrow reading as a method to help students acquire vocabulary,so as to enhance students' English vocabulary acquisition level and improve the current situation of vocabulary learningin English extracurricular reading in senior high school.