An Empirical Study On Effects Of Both Boldface And Glossing On Junior High School Students' Incidental English Vocabulary Acquisition

Incidental acquisition is a popular topic in the domain of second language acquisition.Many domestic scholars made some researches on vocabulary incidental acquisition.They hold that input enhancerment like textual enhancement does have a facilitative effect on students' incidental vocabulary acquisition.Different forms of textual enhancement can facilitate students,inciderntal vocabulary acquisition.However,these researches mainly focused on high-level English learmers and they only investigated one form of textual enhancement.That is to say,researches of the combined forms of textual enhancement are scarce.Based on the present achievements of research,and the incidental acquisition hypothesis,and input hypothesis,this thesis presents an empirical study of the influence of both boldface and glossing textual enhancement on junior school students5 incidental acquisition of English vocabulary.On the one hand,this research studies one form of textual enhancement and branches out to both boldface and glossing enhancement in combination;On the other hand,the subjects of this study are low-level learners.This study aims at investigating the two questions.1)What are the effects of both boldface textual enhancement and glosses on junior school students,short-term memory of incidental English vocabulary acquisition?2)What are the effects of both boldface textual enhancement and glosses on junior school students5 long-term retention of incidental English vocabulary acquisition?The participants were 60 students from two paralleled classes in Grade 9 according to the results of English mid-term exam of the first semester and vocabulary level test.They were randomly divided into two groups:the experimental group and the control group.The experimental group read a passage with 10 target words enhanced in bold and glossing.The control group read the same passage with the 10 target words unenhanced.After that,all the participants had to take an immediate vocabulary test after reading and to take a delayed vocabulary test in two weeks with the same content as the immediate test in different order.The data of the experiment was analyzed with the help of SPSS 13.0 by means of non-parametric test.There were some major findings:1)the combination of boldface and glossing enhancement does facilitate short-term vocabulary acquisition of English of junior students significantly.It can attract students' attention and help students acquire get the target words in short memory,though students' English integrate proficiency and English vocabulary size has a little effect on the facilitation of both boldface and glossing enhancement in combination.2)The combination of boldface and glossing enhancement has some certain facilitative effect on the long-term retention of vocabulary acquisition of English of junior high school students.These findings indicate that teachers can use boldface and glossing to attract students' attention to the important words.In addition,compilers of junior high school textbooks and exercises can take this device into consideration.This thesis can help teachers teach vocabulary efficiently and improve students' vocabulary learning.