A Study Of The Effects Of Narrow Reading On Senior High School Students' Acquisition Of Multi-Dimensional Vocabulary Knowledge

Learning vocabulary through reading has been advocated by many experts and scholars.Among them,narrow reading,which refers to reading texts of the same topic,the same writing style or written by the same author;is considered to be a very effective way to promote second language vocabulary acquisition and attracted some scholars to investigate and explore it.However,most of the relevant researches focus on investigating vocabulary knowledge in spelling,meaning and form,and pay little attention to other dimensions of vocabulary knowledge acquisition,such as grammatical function,syntactic collocation,and paradigmatic association and so on.In addition,the research subjects of multi-dimensional vocabulary knowledge acquisition mainly focus on college students,but there is few on senior high school students.To sum up,this study aims to explore the effects of narrow reading on English multi-dimensional vocabulary knowledge acquisition in senior high school,and fully understand and accurately evaluate the effect of narrow reading on second language vocabulary learning.In this study,53 students from the experimental class and 52 students from the control class in senior high school were taken as subjects.Two reading approaches were implemented by the same teacher in Senior High School: narrow reading and extensive reading: one round of narrow reading training was carried out in the experimental class every week,which required participants to read three texts on the same topic each week;one round of extensive reading exercise was carried out in the control class every week,which required participants to read three texts from different topics each week,three rounds in total.The multi-dimensional vocabulary tests were regarded as a research instrument which designed on the basis of the framework by Nation.An immediate post-test and a delayed post-test were also conducted,aiming to explore the following research questions:(1)What effect does narrow reading have on students' multi-dimensional vocabulary acquisition?(2)What different effect does narrow reading have on each dimensional vocabulary acquisition?(3)What effect does narrow reading have on students' multi-dimensional vocabulary retention?In this study,the date from the experiment was collected and analyzed by the SPSS 22 statistics.The research results indicate:(1)Either narrow reading or extensive reading is helpful to the acquisition of multidimensional vocabulary knowledge in the immediate post-test,but narrow reading is more significant than extensive reading in vocabulary learning.(2)The narrow reading group scored significantly higher than the control group in terms of vocabulary knowledge test scores in all four dimensions: grammar function,syntactic associations,paradigmatic associations and meaning & form.(3)The delayed post-test results show that narrow reading better contribute to the multi-dimensional vocabulary knowledge retention and can remember more vocabulary knowledge in all dimensions than extensive reading,especially in the dimensions of grammatical function and meaning & form.And the interview results show that most of the students believe that narrow reading is an effective way to learn vocabulary.Based on the above research results,the author suggests that English learners should be aware of recognizing and using narrow reading,an effective approach of vocabulary learning,and be more active in acquiring and memorizing vocabulary knowledge by reading texts on the same topic;English teachers can use narrow reading as an effective supplementary method for vocabulary teaching and enlarging vocabulary in class.