The Impact Of Topic Interest And Foreign Language Proficiency On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition In Reading Comprehension

If language structure is the skeleton of language,then vocabulary provides it with organs and flesh(Harmer,1991).Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition is a main method to acquire vocabulary.Recently,English vocabulary teaching draws attention from more teachers and researchers in China.Nonetheless,many senior high school English teachers are fond of traditional vocabulary teaching methods,but most of them cannot meet the demands of different students.This paper is based on the study of Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition,which combines the influence of topic interest and foreign language proficiency together,aiming at giving more conductive suggestions to English education.It is of practical importance to study the impact of topic interest and foreign language proficiency on IVA of senior high school students in reading comprehension.Based on the above background,this study is designed to explore: 1)Can topic interest have influence on Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition of high school students? 2)Can foreign language proficiency impact Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition of high school students? 3)What are the differences of the effects of topic interest between high proficiency students and low proficiency students? In order to solve these questions,this study chose a senior high school in Yunnan province as the research site.132 senior high school students from grade 2 participated in the current study.This study combined qualitative and quantitative methods to obtain accurate results.After data collection,an empirical study was conducted by the researcher,which was followed by the data analysis of SPSS 17.0.Ultimately,this study obtained the following results: 1)Topic interest has an obvious influence on Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition in reading comprehension,students can acquire vocabulary better in the reading materials that they have higher interest.2)It is obvious that foreign language proficiency can impact Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition of high school students.Students who have higher foreign language proficiency can get better IVA scores.3)Students who have higher foreign language proficiency can be impacted by the topic interest more significantly than lower foreign language proficiency students.