Study On The Effects Of Input Elaboration And Enhancement On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Through Reading

Incidental vocabulary acquisition is a hot spot in the field of two language acquisition research. However, the small amount of input, the low frequency of vocabulary and the restriction of context and learners'language proficiency result in the unsatisfactory incidental acquisition effects. Hence, researchers apply the input and output interventions to incidental vocabulary acquisition study, so as to promote the learners'attention and word processing, and improve the effects of incidental vocabulary acquisition.Based on the documents and materials of incidental vocabulary acquisition in second language learning at home and abroad, this paper intends to figure out the effect of input and output intervention on incidental vocabulary acquisition in reading, combining with Krashen's input theory and Swain's output hypothesis. Considering most of previous studies have already made experiments on single word, this paper made a test on incidental acquisition through reading by means of input elaboration, output task, and the combination of them, to find out the most effective ways to improve the effects of lexical chunks acquisition.121 students in senior grade one participated in this experiment. These students were elected from four natural classes and divided into high vocabulary group and low vocabulary group according to the result of English proficiency test. In the process of experiment, all students read an 365-word-long article which contains seven target lexical chunks, what differences lied in the material intervention, including the control group (target phrases were not made special treatment), gloss group (the article provided Chinese gloss of the target phrases), translation group (participants were required to translate sentence from Chinese into English by using the target phrases), gloss and translation group (the article provided Chinese gloss of the target phrases, and participants were required to translate sentence from Chinese into English by using the target phrases)The experimental results showed that the vocabulary level and the effects of incidental lexical chunks acquisition are positively correlated, namely the higher learners' vocabulary level, the better lexical chunks acquisition. The gloss and translation group performed best in immediate test; however there were no differences among those intervention groups in delayed test. And also this experimental found that there exists interaction between the vocabulary level and the interventions, that is, the gloss intervention have promoting effect for small vocabulary learners, however, for larger vocabulary learners, the translation intervention works better.