The Impacts Of Lexical Elaboration And Enhancement On Chinese Efl Learners' Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Through Reading

The present study was based on the theories of Input and Interaction in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and Noticing Hypothesis (Schmidt,1990) in SLA. This paper attempted to investigate whether lexical elaboration and typographical enhancement, in isolation or in combination, can facilitate incidental acquisition of second language (L2) vocabulary through reading by Chinese EFL learners in high schools.Subjects involved in the main study were 180 students of Senior Grade One in Zhangzhou No.3 High School, Fujian Province. They were drawn from four parallel classes according to their final-exam scores and were assigned to four groups. Four groups were of similar overall English proficiency. In the experiment, all the subjects were exposed to 12 target words by reading one of four versions of an experimental text containing these words. The first version was an unmodified text; the second version was an elaborated text where all target words were immediately followed by explanation containing which means plus a definition/a synonym; the third version was an enhanced text which contained all target words set in bold face in order to increase perceptual salience; the fourth version was a text with both lexical elaboration and typographical enhancement. Four different versions were allocated to four groups randomly. After subjects finished reading the texts, they were asked to take an immediate form-recognition vocabulary posttest and a following meaning-recognition vocabulary posttest. Descriptive statistics of the four groups'performance on the form-and meaning-recognition vocabulary posttests were used to investigate whether lexical elaboration and typographical enhancement can facilitate incidental L2 vocabulary acquisition through reading.This study adopted a 2×2 factorial multivariate analysis of variance design with lexical elaboration with two levels (elaborated, unelaborated) and enhancement with two levels (enhanced, unenhanced) as two independent variables, and form- and meaning-recognition vocabulary posttests as two dependent variables. Therefore, there were four treatments. The statistic tool-SPSS 13.0 (Statistical Package for Social Sciences) was used to analyze the data. The results were:(1) lexical elaboration alone does not aid form recognition of L2 vocabulary from reading, but it aids meaning recognition of L2 vocabulary from reading; (2) typographical enhancement alone aids form recognition of L2 vocabulary from reading, but it does not aid meaning recognition of L2 vocabulary from reading; and (3) lexical elaboration and typographical enhancement combined aids both form and meaning recognition of L2 vocabulary from reading.