An Empirical Study On The Effects Of Narrow Reading On Senior High School Students' English Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

Reading is universally recognized as an effective way to facilitate English vocabulary acquisition.Choosing materials appropriately plays an important role in vocabulary learning because there exists a low pick-up rate of vocabulary in reading.Narrow reading,which has rich background knowledge and high repetition of unknown words,has attracted more and more researchers' attention at home and abroad.It is a reading strategy of reading multiple articles of the same author,the same topic or the same genre.However,most researchers at home just focus on T-reading(topic reading),while researchers abroad also emphasize S-reading(series reading).This study aims to explore the effects of two kinds of narrow reading,T-reading(reading of several passages of the same topic)and S-reading(reading of several passages of the same author)on senior high school students' immediate and delayed English incidental vocabulary acquisition(including receptive vocabulary acquisition and productive vocabulary acquisition),as well as the English vocabulary attrition.On the basis of Comprehensible Input Theory,Incidental Learning Theory and Schema Theory,the present study raises three questions to explore the effects of narrow reading on incidental vocabularyacquisition:(1)What are the effects of different types of narrow reading on senior high school students' immediate incidental vocabulary acquisition?(2)What are the effects of different types of narrow reading on senior high school students' delayed incidental vocabulary acquisition?(3)What are the effects of different types of narrow reading on senior high school students' attrition of acquired vocabulary?The participants of the study are 98 students from two classes in a senior high school in Hunan province.The T-reading group read four articles about smoking,while the S-reading group read four articles from the Little House Series.There are 10 target words selected for each group.The participants finished the reading tasks after reading an article and they completed the immediate post-test after reading the four articles.Two weeks later,the participants were given the delayed post-test.The collected experimental data were analyzed by SPSS 17.0.The results are shown as follows:As for the effects of T-reading and S-reading on senior high school students' immediate IVA,we found that T-reading group outperformed S-reading group.It can be attributed to the repetition of target words and schema theory.The repetition of target words in T-reading group is higher than S-reading group,which activates students' background knowledge.As for the effects of T-reading and S-reading on senior high schoolis better than S-reading group,because T-reading allows students to convert the comprehensive input to intake and involves meaningful context that is conducive to vocabulary use.As for the effects of T-reading and S-reading on senior high school students' attrition of acquired vocabulary,the results show that the acquired vocabulary decrease from immediate test to delayed test in both groups,which corresponds to the rule of Ebbinghaus curve.The results also show that T-reading group has a lower attrition rate than S-reading group,because T-reading enables students to form language schema and content schema.Narrow reading is an effective way to senior high school students' IVA.Teachers can employ this strategy to ease students' vocabulary learning burden and facilitate vocabulary acquisition.