An Empirical Study Of Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition In High School English Teaching Based On Reading

Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition(IVA)as one important way of enlarging vocabulary size has been proved existing in second language reading.Nowadays,more and more studies are carried out to explore the influence of factors such as learners',discourse,and vocabulary in second language reading on vocabulary incidental acquisition.However,the results of the study have not reached agreement.Especially there is few relevant researches on high school English learners.The current study aims to answer three questions:1)How do Chinese high school students perform on Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition in second reading process?2)How do discourse factors such as topic familiarity and types of literature affect the acquisition and retention of words?3)How do the characteristics of target words such as parts of speech and lengths affect the acquisition and retention of words?English Reading and vocabulary experiments were conducted in this study.92 Grade 1 students from high school participated in this research and the Vocabulary Size Test showed that they were intermediate proficiency level English learners.A questionnaire was assigned to them to gain insight into their attitudes towards IVA and basic performances before the reading session and the tests.The participants were asked to read two groups of reading materials with similar difficulty level and different levels of topic familiarity.After each reading session,they completed some comprehension exercises and received an immediate vocabulary test as well as a delayed vocabulary test three weeks later.Research results revealed that during L2 reading:1)The Chinese high school students can acquire new vocabulary incidentally through both expository and argumentative reading besides narrative reading.While the students' vocabulary size is not low,the active ones which are often used in students' speaking and writing are relatively rare.In addition,the students' awareness of the role of extensive reading and incidental acquisition in vocabulary accumulation is limited and the guidance is limited.2)Different topic familiarity and type of literature have different effects on IVA of the Chinese high school students.The reading with more familiar topics receive better performances than that with less familiar topics.Expository reading also has a better effect on IVA than argumentative reading with slight significance.3)Different part of speech of the target words have different effects on IVA of high school students.Nouns and adjectives are found easier to be learned incidentally when reading in both expository and argumentative reading.And words ' length has no significant correlation to the IVA in this study.The implications of this study can be illustrated as:1)Topic familiarity should be considered as a major factor,which determines the task difficulty in editing the reading textbooks and making reading test papers.2)Skills and strategies should be taught to student to deal with new words when reading.3)High school English teachers and second language reading material compilers should purposefully choose suitable passages and target words to facilitate learners' incidental vocabulary acquisition.