The Effect Of Glossing On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition For High School Learners At Different Proficiency Levels

Vocabulary is an important part of a language.Incidental vocabulary acquisition is an important way of acquiring words.Many theoretical descriptions and empirical studies have been done on incidental vocabulary acquisition.But few of them explored the effects of glossing language and learners' L2 proficiency level on incidental vocabulary acquisition.Therefore,this study attempts to investigate the effects of glossing language and learners' L2 proficiency level on incidental vocabulary acquisition for high school learners.Based on the research questions,this study picked 165 high school second-year students in Shandong province as participants.These participants came from three parallel classes,and each class was divided into two groups(high proficiency level and low proficiency level)based on their grades in the Quick Placement Test.Before the main experiment,a pretest was done to choose the target words of the study.Next each group of participants was required to read passages with different glossing languages and finish the reading comprehension questions.Then they were required to do the immediate vocabulary test,and they received the delayed vocabulary test two weeks later.The data was analyzed by SPSS 11.5,and the major findings are presented as follows:1.For high level English learners,the Chinese-English gloss has the best effect on IVA.For low level English learners,the Chinese gloss has the best effect.The English gloss has the least effect for both high and low level learners.2.In the immediate vocabulary test,high level learners perform better than low level learners under each kind of gloss type.But in the delayed vocabulary test,only under the Chinese-English gloss condition,the difference is significant between high and low level learners.3.There is no interactive effect between glossing language and L2 proficiency in their performance in either the immediate vocabulary test or the delayed vocabulary test.The findings of this study have some implications.For instance,English learners are advised to do more extensive reading in their spare time.Low level learners had better choose the reading material glossed in Chinese languages.English teachers should provide their students with suitable extensive reading materials.Textbook compilers aresupposed to take the Chinese-English gloss into consideration when they develop materials for English learners in China.