An Experimental Study On The Effects Of Different Reading Tasks On Vocabulary Incidental Acquisition Of Secondary Vocational School Students

Vocabulary learning is very important for language learners.British linguist,Wilkins D.A.(1972)pointed out that “Without grammar very little can be conveyed,without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed”.It’s generally believed that most vocabularies are acquired incidentally from reading by unintentional means.However,how different learning tasks affect incidental vocabulary learning remains to be confirmed.Thus,the purpose of this paper is to explore the effects of different reading tasks on incidental vocabulary acquisition of the first-year students of English major in Dongguan Nanbo Vocational and Technical School(DNVTS)in order to enrich the theoretical study of incidental vocabulary acquisition and provide some practical guidance in secondary vocational English teaching.On the basis of Laufer & Hulstijin’s “Involvement Load Hypothesis” and Krashen’s “Input Hypothesis”,the author designed two different reading tasks(Reading & Answering Questions and Reading & Writing Summaries)to measure the incidental vocabulary acquisition of the first-year students.There’re three research questions is this study: 1)What is the effect of reading tasks of “Reading &Answering Questions” on incidental vocabulary acquisition? 2)How does the reading task of “Reading & Writing Summaries” affect the incidental vocabulary acquisition?3)Comparing the effects of two kinds of reading tasks on incidental vocabulary acquisition,which one is more prominent and effective? For solving the above questions,the author selected 65 students from two different classes as the researchsubjects,and made an experiment and the vocabulary tests for them.After the analyses and discussions of test results,the following findings were generated: 1)The reading task of “Reading & Answering Questions” needs low involvement load for secondary vocational school students,and students get low scores in the tests.2)The reading task of “Reading & Writing Summaries” needs high involvement load for students,and they can get high scores in the tests.3)Different reading tasks have a significant impact on incidental vocabulary acquisition,but the reading task of “Reading & Writing Summaries” is better than the reading task of“Reading & Answering Questions” to promote their incidental vocabulary acquisition.Finally,in accordance with the findings of this experiment,several pedagogical implications were listed out.First,secondary vocational English teachers must stimulate students to read extensively in class or out of class and set up the reading tasks reasonably.Second,English teachers should pay attention to the teaching and learning of vocabulary,which can pave on the way for students to acquire more new vocabularies in their future reading.Thirdly,in secondary vocational English teaching,teachers should direct the students to integrate the methods of intentional and incidental vocabulary learning.Lastly,secondary vocational English teachers should attach great importance to the input and output of English language.