A Study On The Effect Of Glosses On Senior High School Students’ Incidental Acquisition Of English Vocabulary

Vocabulary is the basis and essential element of language learning.However,it is impossible to spend the limited classroom time on intentional vocabulary learning.Therefore,students can acquire vocabulary incidentally in the process of reading.Glosses can help learners understand the meaning of the text,pay more attention to new words and promote incidental vocabulary acquisition.Research at home and abroad have shown that glosses can promote learners’ incidental vocabulary acquisition.But there is no agreement on which gloss is most conducive to incidental vocabulary acquisition.Based on the "Noticing Hypothesis","Input Hypothesis" and "Hierarchical Model",this study discusses the effects of glosses on Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition and Retention,such as no gloss,single Chinese gloss,single English gloss,multiple Chinese gloss and multiple English gloss,and verifies which gloss method is most conducive to learners’ incidental vocabulary acquisition,and the differences of the above results among learners at different levels.In the immediate test,the effect of incidental vocabulary acquisition from good to bad is single Chinese gloss group,multiple Chinese gloss group,single English gloss group,multiple English gloss group and no gloss group.Except that there is no remarkable difference between the test scores of single English gloss group and multiple Chinese gloss group,there are significant differences in the test scores of other gloss groups.This study takes three parallel classes of senior one in an ordinary high school in Shandong Province as subjects,a total of 148 people.The subjects were divided into five groups,and each group included high-level students and low-level students with similar numbers.The experiment carried out immediate test and delayed test on the subjects.The subjects carried out immediate test immediately after reading the reading materials,and delayed test one week later test the incidental vocabulary acquisition and retention effect of the subjects.Finally,the collected data are counted and analyzed,and the following results are obtained:In the delayed test,single English is more conducive to vocabulary retention than multiple Chinese.There is no significant gap in the retention effect of incidental vocabulary acquisition between single English gloss group and multiple Chinese gloss group.There was no significant difference in retention effect of incidental vocabulary acquisition between multiple Chinese gloss group and multiple English gloss group.For different levels of subjects,the study found that: in the immediate test,language level has significant effect on incidental vocabulary acquisition,different glosses have significant effect on incidental vocabulary acquisition,and the interaction between language level and glosses has no significant effect on incidental vocabulary acquisition.In the delayed test,among high-level learners,single English gloss is more conducive to vocabulary retention than multiple Chinese gloss.However,among low-level learners,the retention effect of multiple Chinese incidental vocabulary acquisition is better than that of single English gloss.From the perspective of incidental vocabulary acquisition,this study further discusses which gloss can effectively promote senior high school students’ Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition in reading.And verifies whether the above results are different among learners at different levels,so as to provide new evidence for relevant studies such as vocabulary gloss methods and incidental vocabulary learning.This study provides a reference for the writers of English textbooks,teaching aids and extracurricular English books.It can also provide effective suggestions for senior high school English teachers’ English vocabulary teaching and students’ vocabulary learning.