An Introspective Study Of "Incidental" Vocabulary Acquisition In Reading Process For EFL Learners

It is generally accepted that a considerable percentage of the L2 vocabulary of learners is acquired incidentally, i.e. as a"by-product"of reading. The author's personal interest in this subject triggered by the main inspiration coming from inferencing at text level through the processes of reading comprehension, focusing primarily on learners'processes in a lexical inferencing task. A second source of inspiration in examining learners'processes in comprehension was Haastrup's (1991) notion of receptive competence, which refers to"the way in which learners of a foreign language understand written or spoken text in this language".This study investigates the lexical inferencing made by Chinese EFL learners when they encounter unknown words in English texts. 120 graduate students who are at the similar English proficiency level were selected as the subject for this study.Then the main conclusions are drawn as follows:1. There is a significant correlation between students'vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension. Better vocabulary competence contributes to better reading comprehension.2. Lexical inferencing instruction results in the recognition and employment of varied types of knowledge sources and contextual cues which facilitate the appropriate word meanings inferred.3. Both tasks use similar types of knowledge sources and contextual cues when making inferences. Participants make use of more types of knowledge sources and contextual cues in the process of inferencing and they practice the inferencing strategy more frequently.