Effects Of Different Forms Of Gloss On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Through Reading By High School Students

Vocabulary plays an indispensable part in any language learning, and vocabulary sizes have a direct effect on second language learners’ level. As one way of meaningful vocabulary learning, incidental vocabulary acquisition(IVA) has drawn lots of attention from scholars at home and abroad. Many previous studies have shown that the process of listening, speaking, reading and writing can stimulate IVA, and incidental vocabulary through reading has been done the most among all the four language activities. Gloss is considered as an effective way on IVA through reading, and it also draws attention in the field of vocabulary acquisition. In this research, four types of gloss in this experiment are used to explore the effect on IVA and to see which gloss is the most effective to IVA(Chinese single gloss, Chinese multiple-chocie gloss, English single gloss and English multiple-choice gloss).Based on Krashen’s “comprehensible input hypothesis”, Crack and Lockhart’s “depth of processing hypothesis” and Schmidt’s “noticing hypothesis”, this experiment is carried out in a senior high school in Jiangxi province. 70 subjects from senior 1 were divided into four groups randomly. The four groups’ subjects were required to read a text with four different types of gloss. In the reading material, there were totally 10 target words, and an immediate test on these words was carried out right after the subjects reading and finishing questions about the text, and one weeks later, the delayed test was held. The content of immediate test and delayed test were both on the 10 target words.SPSS was used to analyze the data collected from the experiment, and the results are presented in the following:1) In immediate test, English multiple-choice gloss has the best effect on IVA through reading than other three types of gloss, and the second one is English single gloss. For Chinese gloss, the acquisition of new words in the condition of single gloss and multiple-choice gloss is nearly the same. However, there is not a significant difference on the effect of glosses on IVA.2) In delayed test, English single gloss is the most effective gloss on IVA in long-term memory, and the second best is English multiple-choice gloss. In addition, for Chinese gloss in long-term memory, Chinese single gloss can make language learners keep more words than Chinese multiple-choice gloss. There is a significant difference among the four groups in the retention of the target words.Some practical and pedagogical implications are given to both teachers and extracurricular reading material editors. For teachers, they could give suggestions for students on how to choose suitable reading material to acquire new words as many as possible. For editors, in order to guarantee the effectiveness of reading material, English single gloss could be more applied to compile the extracurricular reading material.