Effectiveness Of Sentence Reading And Gap Filling On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition For Senior High School Students

With the development of economy,English plays an increasingly prominent role in international communication.English learning has also received more and more attention.As the basis of English learning,vocabulary plays an important role in improving English.Vocabulary learning can be divided into intentional learning and incidental acquisition.A large number of studies have shown that students can acquire vocabulary incidentally in English learning.Sentence reading and Gap filling,as two common tasks in students' daily English learning,play an important role in incidental vocabulary acquisition.However,it remains to be considered which task is more conducive to incidental vocabulary acquisition.Based on the Involvement Load Hypothesis(Laufer & Hulstijn,2001)and Noticing hypothesis(Schmidt,1990),the study is designed to explore whether Sentence reading and Gap filling can incidentally acquire vocabulary in daily English learning;which task is more conducive to incidental vocabulary acquisition in the immediate test;and which task is more conducive to incidental vocabulary acquisition in delayed test;which kind of task is more conducive to the memory and preservation of vocabulary among Sentence reading and Gap filling.In this experiment,91 students with English vocabulary level between 2000 words and 3000 words in the Huaibei City Experimental High School are selected as the experimental subjects.They are divided into 2 groups,the first group are asked to finish sentence reading,and the second group are asked to finish gap filling.The students would attend the immediate test shortly after completing the reading material,and a delayed test would be conducted one week after the immediate test.The content of the immediate test and the delayed test are the same.All of them are 12 target words in the reading material,but the words are arranged in a different order.The experimental results show that both Sentence reading and Gap filling can promote learners' incidental vocabulary acquisition.In the immediate test,Gap filling is more conducive to learner's vocabulary incidental acquisition than Sentence reading;the immediate vocabulary test scores of Gap filling are significantly higher than thatof sentence reading;In the delayed test,both of the two tasks can still incidentally acquire a certain amount of vocabularies,but are lower than in the immediate test,,and there are no significant differences between the two tasks.and the vocabulary retention under these two tasks is not significantly different.