The Impact Of High School Students’ English Proficiency And Topic Interest On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition In Reading

Words,which are the most basic contents of a language,play an important role in learners’ language competences.The newest National English Curriculum Standards for General High School requires students to learn words through texts and to comprehend and express information and opinions related to various topics.Thus,the relationships among words,texts and topics are all emphasized.Some resent studies showed that language proficiency together with topic interest impact on the results of Students’ Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition.However,most of the subjects of these experiments are L2 learners in other countries.This study was supposed to inquire into the correlation among high school student’s English proficiency,topic interest and incidental vocabulary acquisition through extracurricular reading.Based on Rieder’ s “Focus” and “Enrichment” model,this study aims to answer questions as follow: 1)how does English proficiency impact with high school students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition? 2)how does topic interest impact with high school students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition? 3)will the impacts of topic interest differ according to students’ English proficiency level?The subjects are students from Class 1 and Class 8,Grade one in a Middle School in Chongqing.They were divided into 3 level according to test scores,and 2 groups in each level according to their topic interest.Two passages with the same difficulty but different topics were read;tests about target words conducted one week before reading and immediately after reading.The results show that: 1)English proficiency will significantly impact with high school students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition—the higher the level is,the more words may be learnt.2)topic interest will also impact with high school students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition—on the one hand,more words in an article will be acquired by students withhigher topic interest,on the other hand,a student can acquire more words from the article of which the topic he/she is interested in;3)the impacts of topic interest differs according to students’ English proficiency level—the higher the level is,the greater the impact will be.