An Investigation Into The Effects Of Post-Reading Tasks On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition In High School Students

Incidental vocabulary acquisition(IVA)has always attracted widespread attention from researchers at home and abroad.Various studies have proved that it is one of the important ways for L2 learners to acquire vocabulary efficiently.However,there has reached no unified conclusion as to which post-reading task is the most conducive one to IVA.And most of the research participants are college students.There lacks research on IVA in high school students,especially that in junior high school students.Thus,the specific research questions of this study are as follows:(1)How do different post-reading tasks affect the incidental vocabulary acquisition in junior high school students?(2)How do different post-reading tasks affect the incidental vocabulary acquisition in senior high school students?(3)For students in different grades,is the post-reading task that is most conducive to their incidental vocabulary acquisition the same?In this study,100 students in the second grade of junior high school and 100 students in the second grade of senior high school in a four-star high school in Jiangsu Province were chosen as the participants.All participants in junior high school were divided into four parallel groups A,B,C,D,and those in senior high school were divided into a,b,c,d.The researcher selected two English articles that are suitable for junior and senior high school students respectively.Each group was required to complete reading comprehension and different post-reading tasks within the prescribed time: reading comprehension and multiple choice questions task,reading comprehension and answering questions task,reading comprehension and translation task,reading comprehension and summary writing task,followed by a vocabulary gain test.After one week,participants were required to take a vocabulary retention test and an interview.All the raw data was statistically analyzed by SPSS 24.0,and the following conclusions were drawn:(1)All the four post-reading tasks have an effect on the vocabulary gain of junior high school students,and translation task works best among them.Types of the four post-reading tasks have no significant effect on vocabulary retention of junior high school students.But in terms of the meanscores,summary writing task is the most effective one.(2)The four post-reading tasks have a significant effect on both the vocabulary gain and vocabulary retention of senior high school students,among which the effect of summary writing task ranks first.(3)For students in different grades,the post-reading task that is most conducive to students’ IVA is not exactly the same.In terms of vocabulary retention,it is almost identical,but different in terms of vocabulary gain.Based on results and discussion,this study has obtained some English vocabulary teaching and learning implications and put forward the following suggestions:(1)Teachers need to pay attention to the choice of reading materials and the design of post-reading tasks,adopting more output-oriented tasks with high involvement index rather than just use the traditional multiple choice questions task;(2)Teachers should guide learners to read extensively and master the appropriate vocabulary learning methods,helping them achieve their IVA;(3)Teachers should appropriately introduce the summary writing task in junior high school,so that students can get a reasonable and effective exercise,so as to lay the foundation for their vocabulary learning in senior high school;(4)To ensure the effect of IVA,learners should review and consolidate what they acquire as soon as possible to avoid excessive oblivion.