Effects Of Working Memory Capacity And Reading Enhancement Tasks On Chinese EFL Learners’ Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Through Reading

Incidental vocabulary acquisition is generally considered as the process of unconsciously picking up new words while learners are involved in language-related activities.Learners can incidentally acquire L2 vocabulary through reading.Nevertheless,incidental vocabulary learning is a time-consuming and low-efficiency process.Working memory capacity and reading enhancement tasks are among the various factors affecting incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading.Starting from three important theories,namely depth of processing theory,involvement load hypothesis and noticing hypothesis,this study aims to investigate the effects of working memory capacity and reading enhancement tasks on Chinese EFL learners’ incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading.One hundred and twenty-eight English majors were engaged in the research as subjects and they were all from a Henan-based university.They are from four parallel classes and have just started their systematic learning of English language as a major.So they are relatively balanced in terms of English proficiency.Subjects firstly took a WMC test.According to their scores in the WMC test,two WMC groups were made and assigned two different reading tasks,namely non-enhanced task versus enhanced task,whereby the subjects are eventually divided into four groups.They are of: WMCL / reading comprehension,WMCL / reading comprehension plus translation,WMCH / reading comprehension;WMCH / reading comprehension plus translation.The subjects were required to read an article of about 360 words from CET-4 and finish their respective assignments.10 non-words were used as the target words.An immediate post-test and a delayed post-test were conducted to test their acquisition of the target words.SPSS 19.0 was implemented to analyze the data collected.By means of analysis model of two-way ANOVA,covariance and partial correlation analyses,major conclusions can be drawn as follows:Firstly,the subjects’ WMC can significantly influence the effects of incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading with the correlation being 0.274.However,the impact cannot last long.Secondly,the task type can greatly influence the incidental vocabulary acquisition.It can predict 36.4% of the discrepancy concerning the incidental vocabulary acquisition effects.In addition,the impact is to some extent long-lasting.Thirdly,compared with subjects’ WMC,the task type can exert a bigger impact on the incidental vocabulary acquisition.The interactive effect between subjects’ WMC and the task type is not significant.This research is of some pedagogical implications.Theoretically,the research further testifies the importance of reading enhancement research,for example the design of reading enhancement tasks;the impact of working memory capacity as an important covariate is also emphasized.Practically,the current research makes it clear that: teachers or teaching material developers ought to consciously design reading enhancement tasks that can trigger deeper cognitive processing of the information of target words;on learners’ part,they are expected to consciously do some reading enhancement tasks rather than merely read a lot.