Abstracts Education

Examining conditions of incidental L2 vocabulary acquisition through reading

by Richard M. Zahar

The study examines to what extent and under what conditions incidental L2 vocabulary acquisition through reading occurs. The all-male subjects were 144 grade seven ESL learners at a French-language high school in Montreal. They were previously placed into 5 groups, ranging from beginner to bilingual, according to their English language ability as assessed by the school's English placement test. To study the extent of incidental acquisition through reading, a Vocabulary Levels Test (Nation, 1990) was administered to determine students' initial vocabulary knowledge which indicated that this knowledge correlated with their group placement level, and that the majority of the subjects were proficient at the 2000-word frequency level. A story having a vocabulary difficulty at this level, as analyzed by two computer programs, was chosen and a pretest and posttest were developed in the same format as Nation's test using words from the story. Two weeks after the pretest, the students heard the story on tape while following along with the written text. Posttests were administered 48 hours after the treatment. Further conditions were examined in post hoc analyses on the effects of contextual richness and number of appearances of a word. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)