Effects Of The Incidental And Intentional Learning On Vocabulary Retention For Rural High School Students

In 2003,the Standard of English Curriculum formulated by the Ministry of Education detailed a set of requirements for secondary school students.They are required to master a vocabulary of 3300 words and 400-500 set phrases in order to meet the demands stipulated in the curriculum(Level 8).This task,while moderate for most students in urban schools,poses a new challenge to Chinese high school students in the countryside.The biggest problem that the students face is how to understand,store and master the vocabulary efficiently.In the instructions for middle school teachers,tasked-based approach is generally introduced where the emphasis is placed on functional and communicative dimensions of language.As it pays more attention to meaning rather than form,students are expected to acquire vocabulary in specific contexts.However,the subjects in Grade One whose vocabulary is below 2000 words can hardly guess the words meaning in the context.As James Cody(1997) argues,beginners with inadequate command of essential vocabulary can hardly expected to carry out vocabulary learning merely through exposure to texts.Based on Krashen's Input Hypothesis and Craik and Lockhart's theory of "level of Processing" this paper attempts,from the cognitive perspective,to study the effects of the incidental learning and intentional learning on vocabulary retention by low-level English learners in Chinese rural schools.The issues to be explored include:1) Can words be learned in context incidentally by middle school students in the countryside,as is implied in the mainstream present-day teaching approach? If yes,how effective? 2) In terms of vocabulary,which kind of learning is more effective for the EFL learners at the initial stage? To help clarify and testify the discussion,],an experimental research has been designed.The sample consists of three natural classes in the author's school.Each class received respectively one of the three word learning strategies:context with a word list,context alone,and word list alone.Two weeks after the treatment,a simple test of matching the words with the correct definition was implemented to measure the learning effects.The findings revealed the following:1.Middle school students in Grade One in rural areas can acquire some new words through incidental learning in reading.2.The intentional vocabulary learning through memorization of words in wordlist enables students to acquire more words than the incidental vocabulary learning through reading.It has a good effect on short-term memory.3.Reading with the help of a word list results in better textual understanding as well as the memorization of vocabularies,and in terms of retention rates, learning thorough reading prove much more effective than learning through wordlist memorization.Incidental learning plus wordlist proves to be the most effective approach for the long-term retention of vocabulary by middle school students.These findings bear significant pedagogical implications.For the purpose of helping middle school students to enlarge vocabulary and more important,to improve English vocabulary retention rate,a primary task for teachers of English in rural middle schools is to help learner's combine the incidental and intentional learning strategies in their English vocabulary studies.Nuanced word learning instructions offered in accordance with varying level of language proficiency are therefore necessary and conducive to the development of students' vocabulary building.