Effects Of Chinese And English Glosses On Senior High School Students' Incidental Acquisition Of Concrete And Abstract Words:An Empirical Study

Based on the previous studies,glossing is advocated as a beneficial way to promote incidental vocabulary acquisition,which can attract readers' attention to unknown words and enhance the language input.Thus,the effectiveness of different gloss language in reading has been discussed,but no consistent conclusions have been attained.This study examined the differential effects of L1 gloss and L2 gloss on Chinese speaking senior high school students' acquisition of concrete and abstract English words.Two questions were discussed in the current study: 1)What are the effects of different gloss language(L1 or L2)on learning concrete words? 2)What are the effects of different gloss language(L1 or L2)on learning abstract words? The study involved 62 participants from senior high school,31 participants were assigned to L1 gloss group,31 participants were assigned to an L2 gloss group.Both groups took part in three test,a pre-test,immediate post-test,and delayed post-test.In the pre-test and delayed post-test,participants were required to give definition of the words or chose the correct category which best matched the target words.In the immediate post-test,participants read a passage containing 14 target words(7 concrete words and 7 abstract words).The participants also finished the same vocabulary test and answered four comprehension questions.Assessed with a pre-test,immediate post-test,and delayed post-test,each group's knowledge of the target words was compared with that of the other group from the perspective of vocabulary gain and retention.The results indicated that L1 gloss led to better performance in concrete words acquisition.However,as for abstract words,the difference between L1 gloss and L2 gloss was not significant.Though L1 gloss group got slightly higher scores than L2 gloss group.The significances of the present study are: 1)enriching the research on glosses and incidental vocabulary learning through reading;2)providing some useful suggestions for vocabulary learning and teaching and reading material compiling.