An Experimental Study Of Effect Of Repetition On High School Students’ Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

Vocabulary is the basis of language,an important part in language learning,and a key factor affecting learners’ language proficiency.At the same time,the general high school English curriculum standards issued by the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China in 2017 also pointed out that one of the key points of high school vocabulary teaching is to expand students’ vocabulary through extensive reading.It can be seen that helping students to expand their vocabulary and increase their vocabulary knowledge is in line with the requirements of learning,reality and the state.However,English teachers are often unable to devote much time to vocabulary teaching in vocabulary teaching.Vocabulary teaching and learning methods are mainly learned by rote or mechanical training,which greatly affects the effect of high school student’ vocabulary learning.Therefore,it is an urgent problem to find a suitable and effective vocabulary learning method to expand the vocabulary of senior high school students.In recent years,incidental vocabulary acquisition has been concerned in the area of learning vocabulary.Repetition as an indispensable factor affecting incidental vocabulary acquisition is also attached great attention by many scholars.However,there is little research on the combination of the repetition and incidental vocabulary acquisition.And there is no generally accepted view that the times of word exposure frequency can be acquired by learners.What is more,most of the subjects are non-English majors or vocational college students while researches on the junior and senior middle school students are few.Therefore,this study attempts to investigate effect of repetition on high school students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition.The experiment randomly selected three groups of high school students in Hebei Tianjiabing Middle School,attached to Hebei Normal University.Each group has 15 people and 45 people in total as the research subjects.By means of immediate and delayed vocabulary tests,the effects of different word exposure frequency(six times,eight times and ten times)on high school students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition were explored.Namely,this study intends to answer the following questions:(1)What is the effect of different word exposure frequency(six times,eight times and ten times)on high school students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition in immediate test?(2)What is the effect of different word exposure frequency(six times,eight times and ten times)on high school students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition in delayed test?(3)What are the difference between the immediate effect of high school students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition and the delayed one?The results of the study show that:(1)in the immediate and the delayed vocabulary test,the high school students’ vocabulary size increased with the frequently exposure of the target words.Namely,vocabulary repetition of six times did not produce a particularly significant acquisition effect.As for the eighth times,vocabulary acquisition peaked.From eight-time-exposure to ten-time-exposure,there was no significant change in vocabulary acquisition.(2)The effect of repetition on high school students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition has a better immediately productive consequence.