Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition
It is generally aepted that a considerable amount of vocabulary is acquired incidentally, i. e. as a “by-product”of reading (e. g., Nation & Coady, 1988; Nation, 2001). Incidental learning is defined as “learning without an intent to learn, or as the learning of one thing, for exaudent's primary objective is to do something else” (Laufer & Hulstijn, 2001, ). Incidental vocabulary acquisition can be defined as “the learning of new words as a by-product of a unicative activity, such as reading, listening, and interaction, which ours through multiple exposure to a word in different contexts” (Huckin & Coady, 1999, ). For incidental vocabulary acquisition to our, attention to lexical forg lexical are two necessary and crucial factors.
The concept of attention is used to describe “the processes involved in selecting the information to be processed and stored in memory” (Robinson, 1993, ). In incidental vocabulary acquisition, the learner's attention is priunicative meaning, not on fors argue that vocabulary learning requires attention to both meaning and form (e. g., Ellis, 1995; Robinson, 1995). Sch that, to soious attention to foral learning. Intake is defined as the subset of input that is attended to and noticed. In other words, attention to form in the input is necessary for input to bee intake and thus available for further g. Attention is clearly related to purpose, which in turn is governed in large part by task demands. L2 researchers (e. g., Schmidt, 1990) claial acquisition is possible when task demands force L2 learners' attention onto specific features in the input. In other words, well-designed tasks can facilitate noticing of aspects of L2 syntax, vocabulary, and phonology.
It is generally agreed that most of the vocabulary is acquired incidentally (e. g., Huckin & Coady, 1999; Laufer & Hulstijn, 2001). Failure to work out the meanings of essential words may ianding of reading or oral texts. Therefore, it is crucial for L2 learners to develop “on-line”skills or strategies to handle unfamiliar vocabulary, for example, the strategy of inferencing lexical .
Lexical inferencing “involves making informed guesses as to the meaning of a word in light of all available linguistic cues in binations with the learner's general knowledge of the world, her awareness of context and her relevant linguistic knowledge” (Haastrup, 1991, ). In other words, inferencing the lexical meaning of unknown words pensating for vocabulary deficiency by using such clues as cognate words, contextual clues and extralinguistic clues (including background noise, tone of voice, and so on).
Being able to inference lexical is iessful vocabulary learning. Schmitt (1997) developed a taxonomy of 50 vocabulary learning strategies consisting of those used to infer meanings and those used to consolidate words. If these lexical inferencing strategies are used suessfully, they can “serve for purposes of iprehension in a listening or reading context, and under favourable conditions may lead to retention of the word ford other lexical information” (Paribakht & Wesche, 1999).
Research (Paribakht & Wesche, 1997) identified the factors involved in lexical inferencing. These include the written texts in which words are embedded, the features of given words, learners' knowledge and the effort they put in, and the mental activity the learner is focused on.