The Influence Of Glossing Type And Topic Familiarity On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Of Chinese English Learners

Vocabulary is the foundation of a language.Both for L1 and L2,a language learner needs to acquire vocabulary continuously.Especially,vocabulary acquisition is important for L2 learners.However,the words remembered by second language learners are easily to be forgotten.With the advent of incidental vocabulary acquisition theory,more and more empirical studies have begun to explore effective incidental vocabulary acquisition methods to help L2 learners make great progress in vocabulary.Reading comprehension and listening comprehension are two important ways of incidental vocabulary acquisition.When a language learner is reading a passage,he or she encounters new words from time to time.Offering gloss in a reading material is conducive to acquiring new vocabulary incidentally.This study investigates the role of glossing types and the role of topic familiarity in incidental vocabulary acquisition.Glossing can be classified from different perspectives.Four glossing types are discussed in this paper,including no glossing,single Chinese glossing,single English glossing and multiple-choice Chinese glossing.The subjects in the present study were 120 non-English majors from four parallel natural classes and they were divided into four groups as CG,G1,G2 and G3.Before the experiment,another class of 45 students,who were from the same cohort of students,were invited to read 9 passages and finish a topic familiarity questionnaire.According to the results of the questionnaire,two passages were picked out for the experiment,one as the more familiar passage and the other as the less familiar one.Then,the same class of 45 students were asked to read the two passages again and circle the words unfamiliar to them.8 words in each passage were selected as the target words for the experiment.During the experiment,each passage was presented to CG,G1,G2 and G3 with 8 target words explained in no glossing,L1 glossing(single Chinese glossing),L2 glossing(single English glossing),and multiple-choice L1 glossing(multiple-choice Chinese glossing)respectively.After reading the passages,subjects accepted the immediate test and the delayed test.All quantitative data were processed by SPSS 19 and carefully analyzed.The major findings of the study include: 1)Both for the more familiar passage and the less familiar passage,except for the single English glossing,all glossing types can effectively promote the incidental vocabulary acquisition.There are significant differences between the group of no glossing,the group of single L1 glossing,the group of single L2 glossing and the group of multiple-choice L1 glossing in the immediate post-test.In the delayed post-test,the differences between no glossing group,single L1 glossing group and multiple-choice L1 glossing group are significant.However,the difference between no glossing group and single L2 glossing group is not significant.In the immediate post-test,from vocabulary acquisition,multiple-choice Chinese glossing is the best,followed by single Chinese glossing,single English glossing and no glossing.In the delayed post-test,multiple-choice Chinese glossing is the best,followed by single Chinese glossing.Single English glossing and no glossing have not significant difference.2)By comparing the immediate post-test and the delayed post-test,except for the no glossing group,both for the familiar passage and the unfamiliar passage,there are significant differences between vocabulary gains and retention in the single Chinese glossing group,the single English glossing group and the multiple-choice Chinese glossing group.The immediate post-test scores of all the three experimental groups are higher than the delayed post-test scores of the three glossing groups.However,the forgetting speed in the three experimental groups is similar.There is not significant difference between glossing types on vocabulary retention.3)By comparing the more familiar passage and the less familiar passage in CG,G1,G2 and G3 respectively,the topic familiarity has a positive effect on incidental vocabulary acquisition.The score of the more familiar passage is better than the score of the less familiar passage.This study provides empirical data for the incidental vocabulary acquisition effect initiated by glossing type and topic familiarity.It also provides some implications for L2 vocabulary teaching.Firstly,teachers can combine incidental vocabulary acquisition with intentional vocabulary learning in reading.Secondly,teachers should try their best to provide reading materials with moderate familiarity in order to enable students to improve their language and develop better.Thirdly,teachers should properly choose reading materials with L1 glossing and multiple-choice glossing for learners according to glossing types.Lastly,teachers should provide opportunities for learners to practice vocabulary and ask learners to review the new words in time and teach them how to memorize new words in order to turn short-term retention into long-term retention.The thesis has some limitations.Firstly,the background of the subjects is not the same.Subjects are not from the same major and their major background knowledge may influence their language ability.Secondly,the time between the immediate test and the delayed test is short.Thirdly,the research subjects of the present study are freshmen in the same university,and there may be errors in other different universities.Fourthly,this thesis does not consider other types of glossing such as picture gloss,multimedia gloss and the gloss position.Lastly,there is only one type of task in this experiment and the number of task items is small.