چکیده:
This study investigated the amount of incidental vocabulary learning through comprehension-focused reading of short stories and explicit instruction to this goal. Forty male high school students were selected randomly, and divided into two groups of twenty. One group of these students was given five 400-word-level short stories to read with the purpose of comprehension, and the students in the control group were explicitly taught twelve vocabulary items selected from the short stories. Results demonstrated that students in the incidental learning condition did better and gained more vocabulary. The contributions of the study to the field of English language teaching were mentioned eventually
خلاصه ماشینی:
"Contrary to those who strongly believe in the usefulness of incidental learning of second language vocabulary, there are others who point to the great contribution of explicit attention to individual lexical items in a form-focused instructional context.
"Knowledge attainment" can thus "take place implicitly (a nonconscious and automatic abstraction of the structural nature of the material arrived at from experience of instances) and explicitly through selective learning (the learner searching for information and building the testing hypothesis), or because we can communicate using language, explicitly via given rules (assimilation of a rule following explicit instruction)" (N.
In line with these researches, as stated above, the present study investigated the amount of incidental vocabulary learning through comprehension-focused reading of short stories and explicit instruction to this goal.
The target words were blind, bloodstains, bury, sand, spirit, strange, floor, petrol, jewel, sharks, view, and ghost.
As the results did reveal a significant incidental vocabulary gain compared with the outcome of explicit instruction, what comes out of this study seems to be inconsistent with previous research (Laufer, 2005; Laufer and Yano, 2001; Cho and Krashen, 1994; Knight, 1994; etc.
What is more, as it was mentioned earlier, there was an uncontrolled variable which might have affected the results of the study: the possibility that students in the incidental learning condition might have looked the unfamiliar words up in a dictionary, especially since the target words were selected based on their relatedness to the general theme of the stories."