The Effect of Reading on Incidental Vocabulary Learning

The Effect of Reading on Incidental Vocabulary Learning

DASKALOVSKA, Nina

Key words: vocabulary acquisition, incidental learning, reading, vocabulary size, word frequency ABSTRACT A lot of studies have been carried out in order to determine the best ways of learning vocabulary. Some of them have focused on vocabulary acquisition through reading. This paper presents the results of a replication study using the text The Golden Fleece. The participants in this study were 94 university students in the first year of their undergraduate degree in English language and literature in the Republic of Macedonia. In order to determine the vocabulary gains from reading the text, the participants were tested before and after the treatment. The test contained 30 words which appeared with different frequency in the text. The results of the pre-test showed that the participants knew the meaning of 17.7 words. The post-test showed a learning gain of 3.9 words, or 31.9 % of the previously unknown words. The correlation between the relative gains and the vocabulary size of the participants was 0.51, while the correlation between the relative gain scores and the frequency of the words in the text was 0.30.

Article
PeerReviewed

IBU Publishing

2013-05-03

1931