The Effects Of Different Glossing Types On L2 Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Through Reading For High School Students

Nowadays, considerable studies have been carried out at home and abroad, trying to find out the main factors influencing the rate of incidental vocabulary acquisition with different glosses through reading and how different levels students can most benefit from glosses. Among them, some researchers focused on which glossing language(L1 or L2) and glossing form(single or multiple-choice) were more effective. However, there are almost no consistent results yet because of various practical factors, which offers a space for the present study.Based on the previous studies, the present study aims to examine whether Chinese high school students with a 2000-3000 vocabulary size can “pick up” some English new words through reading, and more importantly, compare the effectiveness of different glossing types on L2 incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading. This study was designed with the three main theoretical supports of Noticing Hypothesis, Levels of Processing Hypothesis and Involvement Load Hypothesis. Both qualitative and qualitative methods were adopted. Totally, Senior high students of six classes in Grade Two from Yichun High School in JiangXi province were involved in the study. One class was the subject of pilot study, and other five classes participated in the main study. They were divided into five groups at random to take the reading tests with five different types of glosses, namely, “single Chinese glosses”, “single English glosses”, “English-Chinese glosses”, “Multiple-choice Chinese glosses ” and “Multiple-choice English glosses”, and after reading they received the immediate tests, including a vocabulary acquisition test and a vocabulary size test. The delayed vocabulary retention test occurred a week later. After collecting and scoring the data, the author used SPSS 17.0 for data statistics and analysis. One-Way ANOVA and Pearson Correlation were mainly used to get the results.The results indicated that: Firstly, high school students with 2000-3000vocabulary size could incidentally acquire new words through reading, and English-Chinese turned out to be the best glossing type. Secondly, L1 glosses surpassed L2 glosses significantly in both immediate and delayed test, however, no significant difference was found between single and multiple-choice glosses. Thirdly, a larger vocabulary size in L2 was good for incidental vocabulary acquisition and retention. According to these findings, some practical implications and suggestions for English teachers and editors were offered at the end of this paper.