| Vocabulary is the base of a language,without which no language exists.So,vocabulary learning is the premise of understanding a language.The vital role of vocabulary is also emphasized in our country: The National English Curriculum Criterion stipulates clearly that students in junior high school are supposed to gain 1500 to 1600 vocabulary to support their English study.However,the worrying reality is that vocabulary learning has become a big barrier to many students’ English learning.Students learn new words only through repeatedly transcribing and reciting which is totally isolated from language context and meaning.This way of mechanically memorizing turns out to be ineffective,and it even badly hurts students’ interest in learning English.In this case,it has been an urgent mission for researchers and educators to find a more effective vocabulary learning method.Narrow reading(NR)refers to a reading strategy of reading a series of texts around one particular topic,works of the same author or the same genre.It infiltrates vocabulary learning into reading,making students acquire vocabulary incidentally through the familiar topic and word recurrence.While the previous researches about NR focus mostly on students’ reading achievement.Few studies have been done to explore its lexical effects.Thus,this study aims to prove its effects on Chinese junior high school students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition(IVA),and further explore whether these lexical effects appear any discrepancy on students with different vocabulary learning belief orientations.The thesis mainly discusses three questions: 1)Does NR have effects on students’ receptive and productive vocabulary immediate recall? 2)Does NR have effects on students’ receptive and productive vocabulary delayed recall? 3)Is there any difference in the effects of NR on IVA between“memorizing oriented” vocabulary learners and “read-and-using oriented” vocabulary learners?In this study,the participants were 129 students of Grade 7 in a high school in Jiujiang,Jiangxi province,with the control group 65 students and the experiment group64.And the data were collected through a comparative experiment and questionnaire.The research instruments include 7 reading materials,10 target words,2 vocabulary test papers and 1 questionnaire.After 2 weeks’ experiment,SPSS.23.0 was used to conduct descriptive analysis and independent sample T-tests on the collected data.The major findings are as follows: First,NR can promote students’ receptive and productive vocabulary immediate recall.They can acquire both the meanings and the usage of new words through NR.Second,NR can also help students’ receptive and productive vocabulary delayed recall,which means that they forget fewer as time passing by.Third,inside the experiment group,NR’s effects are still affected by students’ existing vocabulary learning belief orientations.Compared with “memorizing oriented” vocabulary learners,read-and-using oriented” learners gain better lexical achievement from NR.According to the above results,it can be concluded that NR indeed has positive effects on junior high school students’ IVA.And the scientific vocabulary learning belief orientation of learning through reading and using can maximize these effects.Therefore,NR is an effective vocabulary learning strategy which junior high school students can consciously use as a good way to grow their vocabulary.Meanwhile,they should change their previous beliefs,making vocabulary learning easy and effective.Teachers can also apply this method to vocabulary teaching and guide students to use it properly.Moreover,this research also gives some implications to textbook editors on the selection and organization of the reading materials to promote students’ learning. |
