An Empirical Study On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Through Reading

Vocabulary is an indispensable part of language, and it is very important forlanguage learners. There are mainly two approaches to vocabulary learning:intentional vocabulary learning and incidental vocabulary learning. Experts andscholars have conducted the research from the different aspects of incidentalvocabulary acquisition (IVA), such as different reading tasks or purposes, vocabularysize of learners, the learners’ guessing abilities and different learning strategies and soon. The present study is expected to examine the effects of different tasks withdifferent purposes on IVA through reading. It intends to offer some theoretical andpractical implications for vocabulary teaching and learning.The study was based on the theory of “Involvement Load Hypothesis”(Laufer&Hulstijn,2001) and “Input Hypothesis”(Krashen,1985). It designed a task withdifferent purposes, namely, reading and answering questions, reading and writingsummaries. The research questions were as follows:1) Can freshmen acquireincidental vocabulary through reading?2) Do different tasks affect their IVA?3) Whatis the relationship between vocabulary size and IVA through reading for freshmen? Inorder to answer these questions, I chose67freshmen as the participants. They wereEnglish majors from a college. This empirical study was conducted by an experiment,including two tests, one survey of vocabulary size as well as a semi-structuredinterview. The participants were divided into two groups: one group took up the taskof reading and answering questions, and the other reading and writing summaries.Two vocabulary tests were the immediate test and the delayed test. A vocabulary sizesurvey was designed and100words were selected in systematic sampling accordingto vocabulary of CET-4.After analyzing the data, the study has produced the following findings:1) Thefreshmen could acquire vocabulary incidentally through reading;2) Different taskswith different purposes could affect IVA, and the subjects who read and wrote werestimulated to acquire more vocabulary incidentally;3) Learners’ vocabulary sizecould affect their IVA. Also, there was a significant correlation between vocabularysize and IVA, and learners who had large vocabulary could get more vocabulary thanthose who had small vocabulary.On the basis of the findings above, we can draw some implications for English teaching and learning. First, English instructors should be keen on teachingvocabulary in active ways, so as to provide students with a solid foundation ofvocabulary acquisition. In addition, teachers should encourage more extensive readingoutside classroom in college English teaching and learning. Secondly, teachers shouldrealize the importance of IVA in vocabulary learning, and guide students to combinethe intentional and incidental vocabulary learning to improve their vocabularyacquisition through reading. Thirdly, teachers should distinguish the characteristics ofthe small or lower reading ability learners and provide them with appropriate space toacquire more new words through reading. Finally, it is necessary that teachers shouldhelp learners review or practice the vocabulary knowledge that they have known, suchas vocabulary test, keeping diaries, writing journals, story-telling with key words andso on.