The Empirical Study Of Different Input Enhancements On Vocabulary Acquisition Of Senior High School Students In English Reading

Vocabulary,as a cornerstone of any language,plays an essential role in English learning and teaching,and thus vocabulary acquisition is generally acknowledged to be of great importance in learning a foreign language.Nevertheless,learners cannot grasp vocabulary by just relying on the mechanical recitation of vocabulary.Considering the scenario,incidental vocabulary acquisition has emerged,and in due time has been viewed as a process of the unconscious operation when learners acquire vocabulary in other learning tasks where their focus is not on memorizing words.However,there were quite rare relative studies in China.What's more,the effects of different input enhancements on incidental vocabulary acquisition have received rather little attention.Input enhancement was defined as a series of implicit techniques to enhance the salience of formal features in the second language input.The approach was regarded as an acquisition that still happens as a by-product of the activity and defined it as a“semi-incidental acquisition” approach.Accordingly,from the perspectives of the Noticing Hypothesis and the Depth of Processing Hypothesis,the current study examined the effects of different input enhancements on vocabulary acquisition of senior high school students and answered the following research questions:(i)What are the different effects of three kinds of enhancement target words(bold,italics and underlines)on the acquisition of vocabulary form?(ii)What are the different effects of three kinds of enhancement target words(bold,italics and underlines)on the acquisition of grammatical functions? and(iii)What are the different effects of three kinds of enhancement target words(bold,italics and underlines)on the acquisition of vocabulary meaning?To answer these research questions,173 senior high school students from five parallel classes were selected as participants in the study.One class was chosen as the pilot class for deciding on the target words,another was the control class and the rest classes were the input enhancement classes.As part of the treatment,the input enhancement classes and the control class were required to finish some reading comprehension tasks with eight target words which were highlighted in different forms of input enhancement in different classes(i.e.bold,underlines and italics),and the control class read the materials without the enhancement of the target words.Next,a series of immediate vocabulary tests were administered to the participants and the sametest was conducted after a week as the delayed vocabulary test.Finally,the data of the study was processed and analyzed by SPSS.The results revealed that input enhancement have positive impact in immediate and delayed form test as well as immediate meaning test,none of the enhancements has any effect in vocabulary production test.In a nutshell,the results proved that the tactic of input enhancement could be applied to English teaching in order to draw learners' attention to certain particular words.In addition,the method of input enhancement could be pedagogically used to compile English textbooks.