A Study On The Effects Of Topic Familiarity On Senior High School Students’ Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Through English Reading

It is acknowledged that vocabulary plays an impacting role in language learning.Incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading is widely considered as one of the most effective ways in learning vocabulary.Since the 1990 s,researchers provide both theoretical and empirical support to second language incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading.However,few studies are designed to investigate the effects of background knowledge on Chinese senior high school students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition through English reading.This research thus intends to make further efforts to provide additional evidence in this respect.Incidental vocabulary acquisition is compared to “intentional vocabulary learning”.It refers to learners’ acquisition of the vocabulary incidentally while they are engaged in some other learning activities,such as reading,listening to songs,watching movies and so on.The factors that affect incidental vocabulary acquisition are mainly classified into four categories: text factors,word factors,task factors,and learner factors.In this thesis topic familiarity refers to learners’ background knowledge,belonging to the category of learner factors.According to noticing hypothesis and input hypothesis,learners can remember a word on condition that they must have noticed the word through sufficient comprehensible input.In theory,task-based reading can unconsciously guide students’ attention to carrying out certain cognitive processing.Based on input hypothesis,interactive model of reading and schema theory of reading,topic familiarity will assist students in understanding the discourse.This study is to test the effects of topic familiarity on Chinese senior high school students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition through English reading.Thus the author aims to resolve the following research questions: 1.Does topic familiarity affect senior high school students’ incidental vocabulary gain through English reading? 2.Does topic familiarity affect senior high school students’ incidental vocabulary retention through English reading?The design of the current experiment is mainly based on Pulido’s(2003)study.30 participants of Grade One in Jingning No.2 senior high school joined in the formal experiment.After the topic familiarity questionnaire,they were asked to read two expository English passages,one with a familiar topic and the other with an unfamiliar topic.Each passage embedded with 5 target words and was to be read and retold in10 minutes.Participants should retell the passage in Chinese.After completing the reading task,students were unexpectedly asked to do translation production and translation recognition in the immediate vocabulary test.2 weeks later,translation production and translation recognition were administered again inan delayed vocabulary test.Then the data were collected and the analyses were made via SPSS 17.0.Results of this experiment showed that the effect of topic familiarity is not significant on their incidental vocabulary gain and retention in translation production test for senior high school students.But in translation recognition test,the effect of topic familiarity is positively significant on their incidental vocabulary gain and retention.The findings showed that topic familiarity is an influential factor in incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading.Senior high school students can utilize their background knowledge to infer the meaning of new words through English reading.It also offers practical support for the effect of schema theory concerning background knowledge on learners’ cognitive process.This study can be treated as a test of the incidental vocabulary acquisition theory.The study also provides some important implications for second language vocabulary teaching and learning.In future learning,students should pay more attention to selecting appropriate materials to facilitate their incidental vocabulary gain and retention.