Effects Of Topic Familiarity And Reading Tasks On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition For Senior High School Students

Vocabulary is the basis for learning languages,which has a significant influence on learners' language proficiency.But learners still face various problems such as lack of English vocabulary.Therefore,researchers and foreign language teachers have been researching and exploring ways to enlarge learners' vocabulary size.Incidental vocabulary acquisition is an effective approach to learning vocabulary,which refers to picking up new words when students are undertaking other learning tasks.The theory of incidental vocabulary acquisition has attracted the interests of researchers at home and abroad,who have discovered that the effects of incidental vocabulary acquisition in reading is the most significant.Factors affecting incidental vocabulary acquisition include text-related factors,learners' vocabulary size and reading task.However,the present researches in this filed show less concern for middle school students,mainly focusing on college students.Based on content schema theory,the Involvement Load Hypothesis and depth of processing theory,Therefore the study will combine the topic familiarity with reading task to research and explore the incidental vocabulary acquisition of senior high school students.In this experiment,84 students with a vocabulary size 2000 take part in this research.They are divided into four groups and each group has 21 students.According to the result of topic familiarity questionnaire,the author identifies two articles with different familiarity.After determining the target vocabulary,the author sets two different reading tasks with the same amount of involvement load.When completing the task,students are unexpectedly asked to have immediate test and a delayed test would be conducted one week later.The test paper is designed according to vocabulary knowledge rating scale.The content of the two vocabulary tests are the same,but the words are arranged in a different order.Then I collected the data,The data are analyzed by using the method of descriptive statistics and univariate in SPSS20.0.After data analyses,findings are as follows:(1)Topic familiarity can significantly affect both immediate and delayed incidental vocabulary acquisition.Familiar topic is more effective than unfamiliar topic in promoting incidental vocabulary acquisition.(2)Two different reading tasks(Filling-in and Matching)with the same amount of involvement load can significantly affect neither immediate nor delayed incidental vocabulary acquisition.(3)Topic familiarity plus reading tasks can affect incidental vocabulary acquisition,but not significantly.The conclusions will offer some advice to English teaching.During the process of reading,English teachers should select appropriate reading materials for their students;teachers should attach importance to providing students with proper reading tasks;Teachers should also guide students to review and practice new vocabulary frequently.