A Comparative Study On The Effects Of Chinese And English Glosses On Senior High School Students' Incidental Acquisition Of Concrete Words And Abstract Words In Reading

Vocabulary is the cornerstone of language learning,which means that vocabulary can be seen as an indispensable part of language learning.Except for intentional vocabulary learning,incidental vocabulary acquisition is also a favorable way to learn vocabulary.In recent years,there are some researches on incidental vocabulary acquisition in reading.Besides,in order to solve the problems involved in incidental vocabulary acquisition in reading,many researchers began some studies on glosses.However,even though a number of studies have explored effects of different gloss languages(L1 or L2)on incidental vocabulary acquisition,few studies have been administrated to explore effects of different gloss languages on different types of words(such as concrete words and abstract words)in reading.Based on the Input Hypothesis,Noticing Hypothesis,Depth of Processing Hypothesis and Involvement Load Hypothesis,the present study is administrated to address the following questions:Question 1: Which gloss language(Chinese gloss or English gloss)is more conducive to students' immediate memory and retention of concrete words?Question 2: Which gloss language(Chinese gloss or English gloss))is more conducive to students' immediate memory and retention of words?The 124 participants(three classes)were Grade Three students from No.8Senior High School of Huairen,Shanxi Province.In the first week of the experiment,participants in the pilot group(class 235)were required to read a text and circle unknown words among which 6 concrete words and 6 abstract words not known by all the participants were chosen as target words.One week later,participants in the other two classes(class 234 and class 241)took part in two tests: immediate test and delayed test.In the immediate test,firstly,participants in class 234 read the text with Chinese glosses which included 12 target words(including 6 concrete words and 6abstract words)and finished the subsequent multiple-choice questions;participants in class 241 read the same text with English glosses which contained the same target words and finished the same multiple-choice questions.It took them 15 minutes to finish this part.Then,after collecting all the test papers,an immediate test(modifiedVocabulary Knowledge Scale)was given out to each of them(participants in both class 234 and class 241)to test their immediate memory of target words.This test lasted for 10 minutes.Two weeks later,a delayed test(modified Vocabulary Knowledge Scale)the content of which was the same as the immediate test but the order of the target words was changed was conducted to test participants' retention of the target words.Similarly,it also took 10 minutes to finish the test.The data in both immediate and delayed tests were collected respectively.All data were analyzed with the corresponding methods through the use of SPSS Statistics software.The conclusions of two research questions were as follows:(1)Chinese gloss was more beneficial to immediate memory and retention of concrete words than English gloss.(2)There was no significant difference between Chinese gloss and English gloss on both immediate memory and retention of abstract words.What's more,regardless of concrete words or abstract words,retention of words would decrease with time going by.