Definition of Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition
It is generally aepted that a considerable percentage of the L2 vocabulary is acquired incidentally, i. e. as a “by-product”of reading (Nagy, Anderson, & Hermann, 1985; Nation & Coady, 1988; Nation, 2001). Incidental vocabulary acquisition has been identified with either acquisition (Krashen, 1981) or implicit learning (Ellis, 2008). In the literature, incidental vocabulary acquisition has been 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, ), and “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, ). This study uses the definition of incidental vocabulary acquisition given by Ellis (2008), i. e., “learning of so feature that takes place without any conscious intention to learn it” ().
It is not difficult to list out the advantages of incidental vocabulary acquisition over direct instruction: (a) it is pedagogically efficient because it allows two activities, such as vocabulary acquisition and reading/listening, to our at the same time, (b) it is more individualized and learner-based because the vocabulary being acquired is dependent on the learner's own selection of learning ause incidental vocabulary acquisition usually ours in the process of reading, vocabulary is contextualized, which gives the learner a richer sense of the word's use and meaning than that from traditional exercises.
However, as for an exact definition and characterization of the processes and isal vocabulary acquisition, ions remain unanswered. A very general probleion of incidental vocabulary acquisition given above is that it seeal learning ours unconsciously. As Gass (1999) noted, however, defining incidental vocabulary acquisition as the “side-effect”of another activity neglects the active role of the learner in this process. The fact that learning ours as a by-product of reading does not automatically imply that it does not involve any conscious processes. The seeal”with “unconscious”is also criticized by Ellis (1994a, ), who believed that incidental vocabulary acquisition is non-explicit in so far as it does not involve an explicit learning intention (the overall goal of the learner is text cohe process nor the product of such learning is necessarily i the sense of non-conscious.
In typical experial vocabulary learning, learners are required to perform a task involving the processing of some information without being told that they will be afterwards tested on their recall of that inforhod is to expose learners to the relevant material without an instruction to learn, which generally means that learners must perform some task that leads thehe to-be-tested hem to expect a later retention test. For example, learners are required to plete a listening task with some vocabulary iteening text, and are later tested on the recall of the vocabulary iteudy reported in this thesis.
Another way of investigating incidental learning is to ask learners to learn something, but not the information targeted for subsequent testing. For example, learners are told to listen to a text and then recall the contents of it. However, they are not told in advance that they will be tested afterwards on their recall of the unfaening text.