The Effect Of Topic Interest On Junior Middle School Students' English Vocabulary Retention Through Reading

Vocabulary acquisition is regarded as a critical part in the field of Second Language Acquisition(SLA)and reading is not only an essential input source for SLA but also a reliable way to acquire new words incidentally(Nagy,1997;Krashen,1989;Horst,Cobb and Meara,1998;Nation,1997).Majority of previous researches just focused on the effects of different reading tasks(Laufer & Hulstijn,2001),reading frequency(Schmitt,2010),background knowledge(Pulido,2003),L2 proficiency(Pulido,2004)and so forth on vocabulary acquisition.However,there are just few studies to examine the effects of topic interest on students' engagement and vocabulary acquisition,hence,not only the effect of topic interest on vocabulary retention but also the gender and language proficiency are examined in the present study.Guided by Krashen's Affective Filter Hypothesis as well as Laufer and Hulstijn's Involvement Load Hypothesis,the present study is conducted to explore the relationship between topic interest and vocabulary retention as well as the effects of topic interest mediated by gender and language proficiency.To be more precise,the present study aims to answer the following three research questions:(1)Does topic interest influence junior middle school students' English vocabulary retention through reading?(2)Does gender affect English vocabulary retention under the same topic interest?(3)Does language proficiency affect English vocabulary retention under the same topic interest? 72 grade-eight students of two classes from a middle school in Lanzhou participated in this experiment.All of them were required to read two passages with different levels of topic interest,rated as the highest and the lowest topic interest but with the same level of topic familiarity,in which 10 glossed target words were embedded.Then they were asked to finish reading comprehension questions afterwards.At last,students received a vocabulary test by Vocabulary Knowledge Scale immediately,and one week later,the same vocabulary test was carried out again to check students' delayed recall of the target words.The data of the study were analyzed by SPSS 21.0 as well as Excel and the following conclusions were drawn:(1)Topic interest influences middle school students' vocabulary retention through reading,and there is a strong positive correlation between topic interest and vocabulary retention.(2)The gender affects students' English vocabulary retention under the same topic interest.For the high-topic-interest passages,both of boys and girls recall the same amount of vocabulary through reading,while for the low-topic-interest passages,girls retain more vocabulary than boys,revealing that boys are more strongly influenced by topic interest than girls.(3)The language proficiency affects students' English vocabularyretention under the same topic interest.For the students with high language proficiency,they retain as many words as in both high-and low-topic-interest passages,while for the students with low language proficiency,they retain more words in the high-topic-interest passages than in the low-topic-interest passages,revealing that students with low language proficiency are strongly influenced by topic interest.At the end of the thesis,the researcher presents some pedagogical implications for language teachers to select appropriate reading materials and organize reading lessons in reading groups,and the implication for achievement tests to satisfy students' diverse needs is presented too.Furthermore,some implications of the present thesis and suggestions are provided for future studies as well.