On The Effects Of Glossing Language And Glossing Position On Senior English Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

Incidental vocabulary acquisition has gained its popularity over recent decades.Moreover,the English Curriculum Standards of General Senior High School(Ministry of Education,2018)indicates that vocabulary should better be acquired in a language environment.Glossing,as text-enhancement,is capable of promoting incidental vocabulary acquisition in reading.Based on Input Hypothesis,Attention Noticing Hypothesis and Involvement Load Hypothesis,the present study was conducted to explore the effects of glossing language and glossing position on senior high school students' incidental vocabulary acquisition in English reading.To be specific,this study was devised to find answers to the following three questions:1)Which glossing language can better facilitate senior high school students' second language incidental vocabulary acquisition in reading?2)Which glossing position can better facilitate senior high school students' second language incidental vocabulary acquisition in reading?3)Which glossing method does senior high school students prefer?This study was conducted among 180 students from a senior high school in Quanzhou.This research consists of three parts.The first part is a preparation part which is conducted to gather some necessary information for the tests.The second part,the first test is to examine the effects of glossing language and glossing position on incidental vocabulary acquisition in reading(immediate word gain).The third part of the research is the second test,conducted two weeks after the first one,trying to explore the effects of glossing language and glossing position on word retention in incidental vocabulary acquisition.Glossing preference is investigated by means of questionnaire which is carried out right after the second test.Results of the research indicated that:1)Chinese glossing(the first language glossing)outperforms English glossing in facilitating incidental vocabulary acquisition in reading.2)The effects of different glossing positions on promoting incidental vocabulary acquisition in reading is not significantly different.But the glosses in front of the passage have gained a relatively higher score in both immediate word test and delayed word test.3)The preference for glossing methods shows that 61.11% of the students prefer bilingual glossing(glossing language)and 40% of the students prefer the glosses on the margin(glossing position).This result is different from that of the research,though,the reasons students provided to explain their preference support the outcomes of the research.