Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 Research Background
It is widely believed that vocabulary is essential for language learning, which canbe vividly reflected in Wilkins’ (1972: 111) saying “without grammar very little can beconveyed; without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed.” Thus it is more thanimportant to investigate ways of efficient vocabulary learning, especially in the field ofsecond or foreign language learning, where the language learning environment isrelatively poor. It is not difficult to find EFL learners troubling with word learning.Besides, teachers are concerned about how to instruct vocabulary effectively withinclass. For this, heat discussions have occurred among which incidental vocabularylearning is attracting more and more attention.The term of incidental vocabulary learning is first proposed by Nagy et al. (1985)based on their study of native English-speaking children. They argue that childrenacquire most words through repeated exposures in different contexts. The final gains ofword knowledge are a by-product of various untargeted activities, but not the result ofintentional learning. Later, Krashen (1989) introduces this term into the field of secondor foreign language learning. He argues that similar to L1 learners, L2 learners couldacquire words incidentally from comprehensible input.
………..
1.2 Significance of the Study
The lexical quality hypothesis, proposed by Perfetti & Hart (2001), serves as thetheoretical framework for this thesis. According to this hypothesis, word knowledgeinvolves various aspects, including knowledge about word forms (grammatical class,spellings and pronunciations), meanings and word use, consistent with Nation’s (2001)proposal that word knowledge is multidimensional and that knowing a word is morethan knowing its meaning. Besides, within this model, morphological awareness isassumed to be a facilitator for word learning through reading.From the review above, it can be found that incidental vocabulary learning hasbeen a hot issue in the field of both L1 and L2 acquisition. The results come to aconsensus that learners can acquire some word knowledge incidentally throughactivities like reading and listening, and thus supporting the assumption that incidentalvocabulary learning can be a great help for vocabulary acquisition. Most previousstudies, however, only focus on the aspect of word meaning, ignoring that wordknowledge contains multiple dimensions (Nation, 2001; Perfetti & Hart, 2001; Perfetti,2007). Taking other word dimensions into consideration, however, will help to get arelatively comprehensive picture of what has been learned incidentally about wordknowledge during reading.
………
Chapter 2 Literature Review
2.1 Theoretical Background
In this part, theoretical background for the current study is presented. Firstly,section 2.1.1 introduces modes of vocabulary learning. Then lexical quality hypothesisis introduced in section 2.1.2. Vocabulary knowledge is considered fundamental in second language acquisitionand thus paying attention to the modes of vocabulary learning is necessary for us toconduct a study on vocabulary learning. Previous studies are focused on three modesof vocabulary learning: direct and indirect vocabulary learning, explicit and implicitvocabulary learning, intentional and incidental vocabulary learning. Nation (1990) argues that direct vocabulary learning and indirect vocabularylearning are two approaches to vocabulary learning. Direct learning means thatlearners do exercises and activities with their attention focused on vocabulary. Suchactivities include word-building exercises, learning words in lists, and vocabularygames. That is to say, learners purposely commit numerous words to their memorieswhen engaged in these activities. While indirect vocabulary learning refers to thesituation where learners focus their attention on some other features, usually thegeneral message conveyed by a speaker or writer. Thus, even though the learners’attention is not directed toward vocabulary learning, substantial learning can occur ifthe number of unknown words is small.
……..
2.2 Previous Studies
In this part relevant previous studies are systematically reviewed, including thoseon incidental vocabulary learning, on influential factors of morphological awareness,and on the role of morphological awareness in vocabulary learning. Numerous researchers have conducted empirical studies in the area of incidental vocabulary learning. Some are interested in incidental vocabulary learning throughlistening (Jones & Plass, 2002), but most of them attempt to explore the relationshipbetween incidental vocabulary learning and reading (Ge, 2003; Hulstijn, 1992, 1993;Mondria & Boer, 1991; Pulido, 2003, 2004; Saragi et al., 1978; Webb, 2007, 2008 etc.).All these studies have shown that learners can, to some extent, gain vocabularyknowledge through reading but the amount of knowledge gains differs a lot. Thoughsome studies imply that a substantial amount of word learning result from reading (e.g.Saragi et al., 1978), some studies find that only a small quantity of vocabulary gainshappens during reading (e.g. Pitts et al., 1989). Taking this situation into consideration,it is rather important to figure out which factors influence the results of incidentalvocabulary learning. Relevant studies on this topic will be presented through asystematic review below.
………….
Chapter 3 Methodology .......20
3.1 Participants ........20
3.2 Testing Measures.......20
3.2.1 Morphological Awareness Test..........20
3.2.2 Incidental Vocabulary Learning Test .......21
3.3 Procedure ....24
3.4 Data Analysis .....25
Chapter 4 Results..........26
4.1 Results of the Morphological Awareness Test......26
4.1.1 Receptive Morphological Awareness.....27
4.1.2 Productive Morphological Awareness ..........29
4.2 Results of the Incidental Vocabulary Learning Test ..........32
4.3 Morphological Awareness and Incidental Vocabulary Learning......33
4.4 Summary.....35
Chapter 5 Discussion.....36
5.1 Affix Types and Morphological Awareness.........36
5.2 Incidental Word Knowledge Gains........38
5.3Role of Morphological Awareness in Incidental Vocabulary Learning .....40
5.4 Summary.....43
Chapter 5 Discussion
5.1 Affix Types and Morphological Awareness
The first question in this thesis is concerned with morphological awarenesspossessed by the English majors who are still freshmen. To be specific, the study is tocheck whether affix types influence the participants’ morphological awareness fromthe perspectives of reception and production. Consistent with the findings of previousstudies (Hayashi & Murphy, 2011; Schmitt & Meara, 1997) conducted on JapaneseEFL learners, the results show that the participants, the English majors, perform ratherwell on inflectional morphemes in both tasks.With regard to the word segmentation task (the receptive task), the participantsperform similarly well on both inflectional suffixes and derivational prefixes, and themean accuracy rate of both types of affixes is more than 83%. In contrast, theirperformance on the derivational suffixes is much worse and the mean accuracy rate ofthese suffixes is only around 65%. So the results suggest that, in terms of the receptivetask, the participants show stronger awareness of inflectional suffixes and derivationalprefixes than that of derivational suffixes. This finding is in accord with that ofHayashi & Murphy’s (2011) research, where Japanese EFL learners perform similarlyaccurately on inflectional suffixes and class-maintaining affixes, while they performmuch worse on class-changing affixes. (The class-maintaining affixes andclass-changing affixes in their study are approximate to the derivational prefixes andsuffixes in the current study.)
…………..
Conclusion
This study aims at investigating whether English morphological awareness plays asignificant role in Chinese English majors’ incidental vocabulary learning duringreading. In this chapter, firstly major findings concerning three research questions aresummarized. Then pedagogical implications, limitations of the current study anddirections for further research are also presented. This thesis concerns three questions regarding influential factors ofmorphological awareness, degree of success in incidental vocabulary learning test, andthe impacts of morphological awareness on incidental vocabulary learning. In order toachieve these goals, a series of tasks are conducted and 60 first-year English majorsparticipate in the experiment. The major findings are as follows: Generally speaking, morphological awareness is influenced by different affixtypes included in the words. With respect to the receptive task, the participants showstrong awareness of inflectional morphemes and derivational prefixes, but muchweaker awareness of derivational suffixes. As regard to the productive task, they onlyshow strong awareness of inflectional morphemes, but similarly weak awareness ofboth derivational prefixes and suffixes. Besides, the participants perform much worseon the receptive task than on the productive task, indicating that they show muchstronger awareness of morphemes from the perspective of reception than from that ofproduction.
..........
Reference (omitted)