The Research Of Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition In English Reading Teaching In Senior High Schools

A large number of studies have shown that learners can acquire a certain amount of vocabulary in the process of activities except vocabulary learning.Incidental vocabulary acquisition in reading activities is becoming a focus in the field of second language research because of its textuality and strong maneuverability.Numerous researchers find that proper reading tasks can help the learners acquire vocabulary incidentally.As the critical theory to evaluate the degree of cognitive processing for reading tasks,Involvement Load Hypothesis has laid a foundation in this research area,namely: the more involvement the tasks promote,the better the vocabulary acquisition effect.Many researches have been conducted to study different involvement reading activities;however,few have been done to study the same involvement tasks,especially for senior high school students.Therefore,this study takes senior high school students for research subjects.The reading tasks consist of multiple choice,sentence copy,filling in the blanks with given words and making sentence with target words.This study conducts an instant and one-week delayed vocabulary tests,and it also attempts to answer the following questions:(1)What is the status of incidental vocabulary acquisition in English reading in senior high schools?(2)Will the same involvement reading tasks produce the same vocabulary acquisition effect?(3)Is there a correlation between the task dimension and the results of incidental vocabulary acquisition?(4)Which the four tasks of instant tests is more conducive to receptive vocabulary acquisition ?The study found that:(1)students in senior high schools can acquire words in English reading;(2)students fulfill the task that has higher proportion in "search" can acquire more receptive vocabulary than the others;(3)if the tasks promote different involvement,the vocabulary acquisition effect is positively related to involvement index,and it is unrelated to the task dimension;if the tasks promote the same involvement,the effect of incidental vocabulary acquisition depends on the type of the examined vocabulary and the task dimension;(4)the task of filling in the blanks shows a better effect of incidental vocabulary acquisition both on the instant and delayed vocabulary tests than the other three tasks.In the last part of this thesis,the author also puts forward some feasible suggestions for the current vocabulary teaching.