A Study On Incidental Vocabulary Learning In English Teaching Of Senior High Schools

Vocabulary is an important part in English learning. As for the senior high school students, enlarging the vocabulary size is an important way to improve their English ability. With the development of New Course Reform of high school teaching, the New Curriculum Standard for English has raised the requirement of vocabulary, bringing a greater task for English teachers. In language teaching research fields, researchers and teachers are concerned with questions like: how to help the students learn vocabulary actively and efficiently, how to improve their abilities of using vocabulary, how to help them realize the long-term retention of vocabulary, etc.In recent years, more and more scholars and researchers have come to realize the importance of incidental vocabulary learning. A large number of studies have shown that a significant portion of vocabulary in second language is acquired incidentally by learners through activities such as reading, writing, etc. Different tasks have different effects. However, what kind of tasks should the teacher design and how to design the tasks is still need to be further considered.The subjects of the research are 365 students in Senior Grade Three, Lou Di NO.2 Middle School in Hunan province. They are from six natural classes, including three high-lever classes (gifted classes) and three low-lever classes (parallel classes). They are randomly assigned to 3 experimental groups; each group includes one high-level class and one low-level class. Each group takes one of the following tasks so as to examine the effects of task property on their L2 vocabulary acquisition. (1) Read the text and do the comprehension exercise. (2) Use the correct forms of the target words to complete the sentences. (3) Read the text and use the target words to make sentences. The experiment includes two vocabulary tests. One is an immediate test, which occurs after the subjects finished the tasks. The other is a delayed test which happens two weeks later. These two tests have the same content but different order. This can testify the delayed effects of involvement load with different property. The data were analyzed by SPSS17.0 and the major findings are as follows:1. Tasks can significantly facilitate L2 vocabulary learning.2. Task property is not a determinate factor on incidental vocabulary learning. However, input and output have differentiated roles in task-based L2 vocabulary learning and input plus output tasks are more facilitative than mere input or output tasks.3. Testing time significantly affects the retention of vocabulary that the scores in immediate vocabulary tests are obviously higher than scores in delayed vocabulary tests.4. English proficiency is found to have significant effects on task-based incidental vocabulary learning. The overall effects of task type are modified by English proficiency.The findings yielded from this study have some implications to vocabulary teaching to some extent. Firstly, teachers and learners should have a clear mind of the different facilitative powers of each task and apply them to the learning tasks' design to facilitate the vocabulary learning. Secondly, teachers and learners should attach sufficient importance to design the productive vocabulary exercise to consolidate acquired words through input tasks and let them have deeper processing of these words. Thirdly, teachers should provide the chances to let the students revise and consolidate the acquired words consciously. Students can also create the opportunities to contact with the newly learned words to enhance the vocabulary retention. Finally, teachers should design the tasks according to the English proficiency of the students.