A Study Of English Majors' Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition In Different Input Modes

During the recent decades, researches in incidental vocabulary acquisition are prosperous. Many linguists believe that a large proportion of vocabulary is acquired in an incidental way through extensive reading. However, little attention is paid to incidental vocabulary acquisition (IVA) through other channels. This paper, which is categorized as an empirical study, will make a thorough exploration to IVA of Chinese English-majors in different input modes.The study will be conducted in Foreign Languages College, Jiangxi Normal University. With careful experimental design, the researcher attempts to answer the following research questions:1. Can Chinese English majors incidentally retain vocabulary through reading or audio-visual input mode in the short term, as measured by the immediate vocabulary test?2. If they can, is the acquired vocabulary retained for a longer period, as measured by the delayed vocabulary test?3. With the same learning task, do different input modes affect English majors' incidental vocabulary acquisition?4. Does the learners' English proficiency have an impact on their incidental vocabulary acquisition?After collecting and analyzing the raw data, research results of the study are as follows:1. Learners were able to incidentally acquire vocabulary through reading or audio-visual input, but the long-term retention of vocabulary was not satisfactory.2. As for the effect of input mode on incidental vocabulary acquisition, there existed differences between two learning tasks. With the same judgment task, the difference between reading input and audio-visual input was significant in the short-term retention of vocabulary, but not in the long-term retention; whereas with the same retelling task, reading input had a significant advantage over audio-visual input both in the short-term and in the long-term vocabulary retention.3. High level of English proficiency did benefit incidental vocabulary acquisition, but, whether the difference between each pair of proficiency subgroups reached a statistical sense was influenced by the joint effects of input mode and learning task. In the immediate test, high-proficiency subgroup significantly outperformed low-proficiency subgroup for Groups RTF, RWT and AVWT, but not for Group AVTF, and in the delayed test, the difference between high-proficiency subgroup and low-proficiency subgroup was only significant for Group RWT.In the end, limitations of the present study are listed to provide some directions for future research.