The Effect Of Glossing Modes On Incidental Acquisition Of Polysemous Words

Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition (IVA) has caught the attention of linguists and language experts at home and abroad for a decade or two. Glossing, as an enhancement activity to make up for deficiency in guessing strategy in IVA has been widely believed to facilitate vocabulary acquisition incidentally. Polysemous words are reported to impede language acquisition and teaching, especially in reading where written text is considered the major source of vocabulary development.Based on the theories of Depth of Processing proposed by Craik & Lockhart (1972) and the Involvement Load Hypothesis proposed by Hulstijn & Laufer (2001), the present empirical study, using quantitative measures, investigates how different combinations of glossing types of polysemous words (core sense, contextual sense and periphery sense) affect Chinese college students' incidental polysemous vocabulary acquisition and retention through the process of extensive reading. A total number of 65 students at a university in Beijing participated in the study, of which 32 were of the 5000-vocabulary-level group and 33 were of the 8000-vocabulary-level group based on their performance at Nation's Vocabulary Levels Test (NVLT). Both the two groups took three rounds of tests: reading comprehension test, immediate vocabulary test and delayed vocabulary test.The first 6 of the target 18 words are glossed with core sense and the contextual sense of the polusemous words and the next 6 words are glossed with core sense only and the last 6 words are glossed with contextual sense and another periphery sense. The reading comprehension test consists of 18 paragraphs extracted from news articles from the Internet with 18 target words embedded in them and 18 multiple choice reading comprehension questions followed.The procedures of the test go as follows:before the reading comprehension test, subjects are instructed to read the 18 paragraphs for information and work out the comprehension questions followed. Immediately after the reading comprehension test, the subjects are given the immediate vocabulary test and one week later the delayed vocabulary test are administered.The output of the SPSS (17.0) analyses indicated that the three modes of glossing have equal effects in immediate vocabulary test, but in delayed vocabulary test, for the 5000-vocabulary-level subjects, group 1 has significantly better effects than group 2; for the 8000-vocabulary-level subjects, group 1> group 3> group 2, and every two of the three groups have significant differences. That is to say, core sense has a significant assisting effect in contextual sense acquisition both for the 5000-vocabulary-level group and the 8000-vocabulary-level group; however, periphery sense has significant effect in the 8000 vocabulary level group but not in the 5000 vocabulary level group.The research may give insights to textbook designers and teachers to arrange book editing and teaching practices and classroom activities to help second language learners to gain better vocabulary retention.