| Learning words incidentally through extensive reading is an important way for language learners to expand their vocabulary. It is also an extensively researched topic in the field of second language acquisition. However, there is no agreement on how effective the incidental approach is since many factors may influence the outcome of incidental learning. Despite the fact that a series of studies have researched these factors, the factor of learners' cognitive style is largely neglected. This study explores the influence of the field independency/dependency cognitive style on incidental vocabulary acquisition. Data were collected from 73 students at Beijing Jiaotong University. The Group Embedded Figure Test was employed to measure subjects' cognitive style. Four jokes were chosen as the reading treatment material, in which ten words were chosen as the target words for incidental acquisition. A pretest and two posttests were employed to investigate subjects' vocabulary knowledge gain in the reading. The data showed that there were significant increases in subjects' knowledge of the target words and the amount of gained knowledge was correlated with the degree of field independency. Furthermore, additional data exploration was carried out and the results indicated that this correlation was much stronger for the words with a relatively low exposure frequency in the reading material than for those with a relatively high exposure frequency. The findings have both theoretical and pedagogical implications. They contributed informative data to the rarely-researched joint area between cognitive style and incidental vocabulary acquisition and revealed the correlation between the degree of field independency and the outcome of incidental vocabulary acquisition. The findings also informed language educators and teachers that the effect of incidental approach to vocabulary acquisition partly depends on students' cognitive style and those students with a more field dependent style need extra help when learning vocabulary incidentally. |
