A Study Of Chinese Senior Middle Students' Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

SLA (Second Language Acquisition) came into being as an independent science in the 1970s, when a large number of researchers showed enormous interest in how second language is acquired. From 1980s, more and more teachers and researchers realized the importance of vocabulary acquisition, and their research concerned about vocabulary acquisition method and acquisition mechanism, etc. In the past ten years, some researchers showed great interest in the input means of L2 vocabulary acquisition, and concentrated on the relation between reading and word learning. They argued that incidental learning is and should be the major method in vocabulary acquisition.What then is IVA? IVA is the learning of new words as a by-product of a meaning-focused communicative activity, such as reading, listening, and interaction. It occurs through"multiple exposure to a word in different context"(Huckin and Coady, 1999,p.185). In this study"incidental vocabulary acquisition"means the learning vocabulary as a by-product of other activities that do not focus on vocabulary learning.Based on intentional vocabulary learning and incidental vocabulary learning literature, the present study is designed to investigate which learning mode Chinese learners of English, specifically the Chinese senior school students, more frequently use. We aim to find out how the Chinese learners of English enlarge their L2 vocabulary, through intentional learning or incidental learning. We also hope that the results from this study will enlighten the teaching and learning of L2 vocabulary.To carry out the research, the key research question and specific questions are put forward.RQ: (1) Is it possible for the Chinese senior students to acquire English words incidentally through their reading?(2) If the answer to the first question is positive, then which perspective of word knowledge do the students incidentally acquire, receptive knowledge or productive knowledge?(3) Do such factors as different reading purpose, subject familiarity affect their IVA?The aim of the experiment is to study whether Chinese middle school English learners can acquire vocabulary incidentally through reading comprehension, what aspects of vocabulary knowledge they can acquire. And also the effects of different types of text- based vocabulary exercises/tasks with different involvement loads on the retention of the target English words by 60 Chinese learners in the incidental learning setting. We want to test their the assumption that different text-based vocabulary tasks with a higher involvement load will be more effective for vocabulary retention than tasks with a lower involvement load. We also want to check whether topic familiarity can affect the incidental vocabulary acquisition.60 Chinese middle school English learners participate in the experiment. They are all from a middle school of Pingdu city in Shandong province. All of them are in Grade two, and learned English 5 or 6 years ago. Among them, 30 students are in Group 1, and the other students in Group 2. Both groups are balanced, that is, they are controlled in proficiency, sex, age, etc.Two passages were selected for the experiment. Senior middle school students of Grade 2 should be able to read the passages without much difficulty. The two passages are both about 450 words in length with 9 and 10 unknown words respectively.The experiment is carried on in four steps. The students read Text A in 10 minutes, and the reading instruction for each student is written down on the top of the text. No mention of vocabulary is made. After the collection of the text, the target word test is handed out. The test of Text B is carried in the same procedure. Students are told to write down the meaning of the target as much as they could. Seven days later, delayed test is carried out to test the retention of IVA. The students are allowed 15 minutes to finish the test.The Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS, version 12.0) is employed to help process the raw data and general statistical information. According to the result, the first hypothesis that Chinese senior middle student was able to incidentally acquire some new words after reading was proved and the developing order of the three basic aspects of vocabulary knowledge is: word meaning, collocation and syntax. Students of Group 2, who did the"read and retell"task, did better than students of Group 1,who did the"read and answer questions"task. Topic familiarity also has strong effect on incidental vocabulary acquisition. It is obvious that when students read passage familiar to them, they can acquire more vocabulary knowledge incidentally.The present study has great theoretical and practical significance in the English teaching and learning. The author proposes that it will be more effective for students to enlarge their vocabulary by extensive reading rather than through learning wordlists by rote; and that in order to improve students'efficiency in IVA gains and retentions, it is better for teachers to guide in their reading tasks and to foster their ability in guessing the meaning of an unknown word from the context.