The Effect Of Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition On Junior High School Students’ English Vocabulary Use Ability

Reading plays a significant role in English learning,and the quality of vocabulary acquisition directly affects the efficiency of reading.In English vocabulary learning in junior high school,students often have problems in forgetting words quickly,using words in different situations,and improperly matching of English and Chinese meanings.These vocabulary acquisition problems further influence the smooth progress and reading effect of students’ reading in concrete passages.At the same time,students’ vocabulary learning is mainly based on memorizing intentionally before class,which lacks the certain context.In this way,the effect of vocabulary acquisition is not particularly good enough.Incidental vocabulary acquisition refers to learners’ non-conscious acquisition of target vocabulary through corresponding vocabulary acquisition strategies in the reading context.This strategy aims to expand students’ vocabulary,promote students’ vocabulary use ability in reading,and enable them to have a deeper understanding and mastering of reading materials.Vocabulary learning should not be separated from the context,but rely on the context for the incidental acquisition of vocabulary.Besides,the junior high school teaching textbooks contain rich reading materials,which lays the foundation for students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition in the concrete context.Therefore,the study of incidental vocabulary acquisition in reading is of great significance to students’ vocabulary expansion and the improvement of vocabulary use ability.This study adopts vocabulary acquisition strategies,which is based on Input-output theory and the theory of Depth of Processing,aims to explore the following three questions:1.What is the current situation of students’ intentional vocabulary memorization?2.What concrete measures should be taken to implement incidental vocabulary acquisition in reading?3.Is incidental vocabulary acquisition beneficial to improve students’ vocabulary use ability?In this study,questionnaires,interviews and test research methods were used to conduct a semester-long vocabulary acquisition teaching experiment for 38 students in Class 1,Grade 9 of HanJiaoShui Nine-year School in Zhongning County.The relevant experimental data were analyzed by using SPSS 21.0.The results show that,firstly,there are still many problems in intentional vocabulary learning in junior high school,such as students’ vocabulary learning is mostly separated from the context and is focused on memorizing,which results in fast forgetting and confusion of word usage.Secondly,in teaching practice,teachers can implement incidental vocabulary acquisition strategies in different stages of reading,for instance,before reading class,the teacher could select appropriate passages,and during reading class,the teacher could use a variety of vocabulary acquisition teaching strategies,such as:context,word formation,visual reinforcement,etc.;After reading,the teacher could design output tasks such as fill-in-the-blanks and sentences translation from Chinese to English,which are closely related to the topic.Finally,by comparing the implementation of incidental vocabulary acquisition strategy in the experimental class with the control class,it is found that the implementation of incidental vocabulary acquisition strategy in reading is indeed beneficial to students’ vocabulary use ability.In the end,aiming at current situation of vocabulary acquisition in reading,the author also puts forward corresponding teaching suggestions to help students acquisite vocabulary better in reading,which will promote their vocabulary use ability,and then better improve their reading efficiency.