The Effects Of Types Of Glossing On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Through Reading

It is commonly believed that the language learning is based on the vocabulary.At the same time,the words are regarded as a necessity of language teaching.According to the vocabulary acquisition,a large number of studies have been done by the researchers at home and abroad.In 1985,the Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Hypothesis was suggested by Nagy,Heman &Anderson.In recent years,the incidental vocabulary acquisition has drawn more attentions of the scholars in the second language acquisition field.However,based on a number of research findings,the author illustrates that it is possible to obtain the incidental words acquisition in natural reading but the lower probability exists in vocabulary acquisition.Therefore,many scholars begin to explore a variety of enhancement ways for the incidental vocabulary acquisition.Among these ways,providing glosses for the unknown words is regarded as a beneficial enhancement method.However,the scholars do not achieve an agreement on the effects of different ways of gloss.Thus,it can provide the prospect and chances for the further studies.This experiment aims to verify the results of three ways of gloss on incidental vocabulary acquisition and retention when reading the same material.There are the single Chinese gloss,single English gloss and multiple-choice glosses.With the help of the former experiments,the author originates this experiment.In this present paper,the theoretical bases are the Noticing Theory and the Involvement Load Hypothesis.And the following methods are mainly employed by the author,such as,the questionnaires,reading test,vocabulary tests and so on.The participants are ninety students in Grade One from Tai Kang Senior High School.The ninety subjects are from three parallel classes and then are divided into three groups according to the class.Firstly,it requires that three groups separately study the same reading passage which notes three ways of glosses.At the same time,in the reading article,ten target words are selected.After the reading test,it is time for the immediate words test.Later,the questionnaires are designed for finding out the subjects' opinions of ways of glossing.Seven days later,it will be the delayed vocabulary test.The findings of this paper are as follows:Firstly,the participants in Grade One prefer the single Chinese gloss among three glosses.Secondly,in the immediate test,the multiple-choice glosses are achieved the best results on incidental vocabulary acquisition.And the significant differences do not appear between the single English and Chinese glosses.Moreover,the Involvement Load Hypothesis can be verified with the results.Thirdly,in the delayed test,no significant differences occur among three glosses.However,the multiple-choice English obtain the more stable marks.The Chinese gloss is better than single English gloss.Without reasonable reviews,the results of words retention do not have a positive correlation with the involvement index.As for this experiment,it has enriched the former studies on incidental vocabulary acquisition.It also can provide some implications for teachers and students.At the same time,this paper supplies some references for the editors to avoid the disadvantages of the traditional word list.