The Effects Of Reading Task On Senior Students' Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

Vocabulary is central to language and of critical importance to the typical language learner? (Zimmerman 1997:5).Our second Janguage (L2) students would be the first ones to tell us that a curriculum-wide commitment to vocabulary enrichment assists them in developing their language abilities. Fortunately for students and instructors, most vocabulary growth takes place through incidental learning, that is, through exposure to comprehensible language reading, listening, discussions, bulletin board displays, videos, and so forth reading has been singled out as the primary means, and the most reliable way, to promote incidental vocabulary learning (Stahl 1999). In fact, Nagy and Herman (1985,1987) claim that teachers should promote reading because it leads to greater vocabulary growth.The present study ,taking Krashen's Input Hypothysis , Acquisition-Learning Hypothesis, Craik & Lockhart's Depth-of-Processing Hypothesis, Laufer & Hulstijn's Involvement-Load Hypothesis as its theoretical basses, by means of experimental study, researched Chinese Senior Three EFL students' incidental vocabulary acquisition through extensive reading attempting to find out whether vocabulary can be incidentally acquired through extensive reading and whether different reading tasks affect incidental vocabulary acquisition.This thesis is made up of six parts. Part One is an introduction focusing on the purpose and significance of the study and its practical development in English teaching in China. Part Two deals with literature review on theoretical and empirical researches on reading, and vocabulary acquisition, and how vocabulary can be incidentally acquired through extensive reading. Studies both in and out of China have been investigated in this part. Part Three introduces the present study's theoretical bases. They're Input Hypothesis, Acquisition-Learning Hypothesis, Depth-of-Processing Hypothesis, and Involvement-Load Hypothesis. Part Four is the most important section of the paper, which presents the hypothesis of the present study, the participants, reading materials, testing materials, and the procedures of the experiment. In the experiment the participants were required to do some reading training exercises and also carried out the designed experiment. All the data were collected and entered into SPSS 11.5 for analysis. The discussion and results come in Part Five, which shows that different reading tasks effect incidental vocabulary acquisition. Part Six is the last section and is mainly about the conclusion, limitations and implications of the study.The findings of the study demonstrate that vocabulary can be incidentally acquired through extensive reading and different tasks affect IVA, thus indicating the theoretical and pedagogical significance of the present study.