The Effects Of Reading Purpose On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Of Junior Middle School Students

Language is the external manifestation of human thoughts and communication.The formation of a language is inseparable from the continuous accumulation and flexible use of vocabulary.It is not easy for foreign language learners to learn a second language.They all have problems with second vocabulary acquisition.The degree of vocabulary acquisition has a significant impact on language learning.In applied linguistics,incidental vocabulary acquisition is regarded as an important research trend and has attracted the attention of scholars at home and abroad.At the same time,reading is an important source of vocabulary learning,and English reading plays an important role in English vocabulary learning.A large number of studies have shown that extensive reading can promote incidental vocabulary acquisition.Therefore researchers at home and abroad have studied a variety of possible related factors that affect incidental vocabulary acquisition.But there is less research on the factor of reading purpose.In the studies on incidental vocabulary acquisition,the subjects are mostly college students or senior high school students,and there are few studies on junior middle school students.For junior middle school students,learning English is the key period for them.Vocabulary learning is a big problem for them.Therefore,the author chooses to study the influence of different reading purposes on incidental vocabulary acquisition of junior middle school students,aiming to provide some enlightenment for the research on second language teaching and learners’ vocabulary acquisition.This study uses two important hypotheses as the theoretical basis.They are Laufer & Hulstijin’s “Involvement Load Hypothesis” and Crack Lockhart’s “Deep Processing Theory Hypothesis”.In order to ensure the depth of the research,this research uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to conduct experiments with three different reading purposes,namely “reading to understand the topic of the text”,“reading to understand the content of the text”,and “reading to understand the content of the text”.The purpose of this study is to find out the influence of reading purpose on the incidental vocabulary acquisition of junior middle school students in English reading.Here are three research questions from the study:(1)What are the effects of different reading purposes on incidental acquisition of immediate vocabulary for junior middle school students in second language reading?(2)What are the effects of different reading purposes on incidental acquisition of delayed vocabulary and vocabulary retention among junior middle school students with different reading purposes?(3)What are the differences in incidental vocabulary acquisition and vocabulary retention between junior middle school students with higher and lower English proficiency when reading purposes are different?In this experiment,168 students in 3 parallel classes in the second grade of a junior middle school are the experimental subjects.The subjects were divided into three groups and a class represents a group.The first group takes “reading to understand the topic of the text” as the reading task,and answered the multiple choices questions after reading.The second group takes “reading to understand the content of the text” as the reading task,and state the main idea of the article after reading.The third group uses “reading to understand the details of the text” and translate sentences after reading.During the experiment,students were required to complete different reading tasks without telling the subsequent vocabulary test.After that,the test papers were immediately retrieved and an instant vocabulary test was performed on the 10 target words immediately,and a delayed vocabulary test was performed a week later.The author makes a statistical analysis of the collected data by using BONC DSS 25.0.After data collection,valid data of 152 students were obtained.The following results were obtained for the three research questions.(1)From the overall results,most of the junior middle school students who participated in the experiment acquired a different number of new words incidentally.Different reading purposes cause different acquisition effects.The largest number of the incidental acquired vocabulary was in the class for reading purpose 3(“reading to understand the details of the text”).The class with reading purpose 2(“Reading to understand the content of the text”)ranked the second in terms of the number of words acquired.The class with the lowest incidental vocabulary acquisition was “reading to understand the topic of the text”(reading purpose 1).The results show that the effect of incidental vocabulary acquisition varies from the different reading purposes.(2)One week later,the delayed vocabulary test results showed that in terms of delayed vocabulary acquisition,students with three different reading purposes forgot some words to varying degrees.Most of the students also have a certain vocabulary retention effect.Class 3 with reading purpose 3 has the best vocabulary retention effect,while Class 2 with reading purpose 2 has the middle vocabulary keeping effect.The vocabulary retention effect of class 1 with reading purpose 1 is worse than that of the other two classes.The vocabulary acquisition and their maintenance of the three classes are different respectively.(3)Under the requirements of different reading purposes,learners with higher English proficiency have a better effect on incidental vocabulary acquisition and retention than those with lower English proficiency,and there are significant differences between them.Based on the above research findings,the author thinks that the incidental acquisition of second language vocabulary has a certain influence on English teaching and vocabulary learning of junior middle school students.Compared with general reading purpose holders,junior middle school students with more complex reading purpose have better incidental vocabulary acquisition effect.Compared with junior middle school students with lower English ability,junior middle school students with higher English ability have better incidental vocabulary acquisition effect and more vocabulary retention effect.English learning in junior middle school is a key period of second language acquisition.At the same time vocabulary is the basis of language learning.Teachers should make learners understand the concept of incidental vocabulary acquisition and be familiar with the differences of students’ learning styles and learning abilities.According to learners’ different ability levels,different reading purposes and tasks are planned in reading,so that learners can acquire vocabulary naturally in the process of reading.