A Study On The Effects Of Narrow Reading On Senior High School Students’ English Vocabulary Acquisition And Retention

As the building brick of language and one of the most important indicators to measure the level of language knowledge,vocabulary is of great significance to language learning.Reading is an effective way of acquiring and retaining vocabulary.Distinguished from broad reading(BR),narrow reading(NR)refers to the acquisition of language by reading a large number of works on the same topic,in the same genre or by the same author over a period of time(Krashen,1996).In order to explore an effective way of vocabulary learning,this thesis applies NR to English vocabulary learning in a high school,and investigates the effects of NR on English vocabulary acquisition and retention through the experience of different reading materials.Furthermore,this thesis divides NR into topic-limited narrow reading(T-NR)and author-limited narrow reading(A-NR)in order to obtain more refined experimental data.Based on the input hypothesis,the affective filtering hypothesis and the schema theory,this thesis combines research at home and abroad and proposes three research questions:(1)Compared with BR,does NR improve students’ English vocabulary acquisition better?(2)Which is more effective in improving students’ English vocabulary acquisition: T-NR or A-NR?(3)Which of the three types of reading(BR,T-NR,A-NR)is most effective in improving students’ English vocabulary retention?In this research,92 students in the senior class of Zhenjiang X High School were randomly selected as research subjects to have a reading activity and divided into three groups.Two experimental groups were set up to carry out T-NR and A-NR,one control group was set up to carry out BR.The research lasted for three weeks,including pre-tests,experiment,immediate post-test and delayed post-test.During the pre-test stages,three groups were given an overall vocabulary level pre-test and a target words pre-test.After two pre-tests,the subjects were adjusted according to the results to ensure that the overall vocabulary level and familiarity with the target words were consistent among groups.During the experimental stage,the three groups separately read five texts with the same topic,the same author and different authors on different topics.There was one main text that all three groups would read,from which the 10 target words were drawn.At the end of the experiment,an immediate post-test of vocabulary acquisition was conducted.One week after the immediate post-test,a delayed post-test of vocabulary retention was conducted.The content of both post-tests was the same,only in different orders.The target words in two post-tests were tested in different tasks through Chinese-English translation,English-Chinese translation,gap filling task and sentence production to examine different dimensions of vocabulary knowledge(receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge).All the collected data were analyzed using SPSS21.After data analysis and discussion,the following conclusions were obtained from this research:(1)Compared with BR,NR is more effective in improving students’ English vocabulary acquisition.(2)T-NR is more effective than A-NR in improving students’ English vocabulary acquisition.(3)Of the three types of reading,T-NR is most effective in improving students’ English vocabulary retention.This research holds that NR is an effective way for vocabulary acquisition and retention,and draws the following implications:(1)English learners can use NR as a supplementary choice to promote vocabulary acquisition and retention.(2)English teachers can use NR as an effective way to teach vocabulary.(3)Teachers and textbook compilers can consider the effect of NR when using or compiling reading materials in textbooks.It is hoped that this thesis can enrich the research on NR and vocabulary learning,providing an alternative way for English vocabulary acquisition in senior high schools so that teachers can improve teaching quality and students can improve vocabulary level.