The Literature Review  of Effect of Different Glosses on Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition through Reading for Junior High Students

Vocabulary is the essential element of language and plays a fundamental role in all language activities. The vocabulary size directly influences second/foreign language learners’ ability in using language. Second/foreign language researchers argue that extensive reading can facilitate incidental vocabulary acquisition and gloss,serving as a way to enhance input in reading, can significantly improve the efficacy of incidental vocabulary acquisition. Researchers at home and aboard mainly conduct the research concerning L1 and L2 glosses, single and multiple-choice glosses, task involvement load and so on. However, the phonological gloss indicator of predicting the recognition and reading ability in terms of L1 and L2, has been paid little attention to. Although Li Xiang, a graduate from HeNan Normal University made a research on the effect of phonological gloss on incidental vocabulary learning, she just compared Chinese meaning, phonological gloss and combination while English explanation was ignored. Therefore, in order to provide more ideas for English learners with effective vocabulary acquisition. This study, based on the previous research achievements and related literature review, intends to compare the different effect of various ways of gloss including Chinese gloss, English gloss, Chinese plus phonological gloss and English plus phonological gloss on the learning of the unknown words. 

1. Definition of Gloss 

The  history  of  glosses  can  be  dated  back  to  the  Middle  Ages  when  learners scribbling in the lines during reading the Latin text (Hullen, 1989, cited in Roby, 1999). Later gloss was developed into a kind of teaching aid and was gradually recognized as an efficient enhancement technique. Traditionally, glosses have been defined as short definitions or explanations which usually located in the margin or bottom of a text for the understanding of those unfamiliar words (Lomica, 1998). Davis & Lyman-Hager (1997), however, presented a more comprehensive gloss definition which indicates that gloss might encompass phonetic features, grammar, culture, L1 or L2 paraphrasing. Two fundamental purposes gloss served  are  reading comprehension assisting and vocabulary acquisition facilitating. 

According to Widdowson (1978), glosses presented before reading comprehension is  addressed as  “priming glossaries”, which is functioned as  “advance organizers”While glosses provided during reading comprehension is termed as “promoting glossaries”. 

  Roby (1999) claims that glosses possess both procedural and declarative functions, wherein, procedural functions are related to the know-how knowledge and of cognitive significance, and declarative functions involve specific linguistic knowledge 

2. Definition of Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

 The fact that incidental acquisition takes place in U learning is generally acknowledged researchers. “Most scholars agree that except for the first few thousand most common words, L2 vocabulary is predominately incidentally” (Huckin & Coady, 1999) Then what is incidental vocabulary acquisition? The earliest experiment on incidental vocabulary acquisition was done by Gibson (1985). He designed a strip story experiment to study learning vocabulary through speaking, but he didn't give a definition of IVA. Nagy, Herman & Anderson (1985) bring forward the concept of incidental vocabulary acquisition on the basis of studying how school children acquire their mother tongue. They believe that incidental learning from context accounts for a substantial proportion of the vocabulary growth that occurs during the school years. Long (1981) and Krashen (1985) propose Interactive Hypothesis and Input Hypothesis respectively, but they didn't define incidental vocabulary acquisition. Krashen (1989) argues that language learners could acquire vocabulary and spelling most efficiently by receiving comprehensible input while reading. He intends to use his Input Hypothesis to explain such an unconscious learning process, and describes this process as similar to incidental acquisition. Schmidt (1994) says that the vocabulary learning refers to the learning without an intent to learn, or as the learning of one thing, e.g. vocabulary, when the learner’s primary objective is to do something else, to communicate. Nation (1998) points out that incidental vocabulary acquisition means learners could acquire vocabulary by paying their attention to other things, especially information carried on by the language, and not to learn vocabulary technically. Joe (1998) also mentions that incidental/indirect vocabulary acquisition indicates that learners paid their attention to the comprehension of the context, not the vocabulary in the course of their learning. And it is very effective to acquire vocabulary. Hucky and Coady (1999) define incidental vocabulary acquisition as a learning process of guessing words in reading, and it is a by-product of cognitive activity. Paribakht & Wesche (1999) regard incidental vocabulary acquisition as the learning process happens when learners try to understand the new words they have heard or read in context. Learners could acquire vocabulary when focusing on something else unrelated to vocabulary learning. Laufer and Hill (2000) define it as the by-product of other activity, such as reading or communication without the learner's conscious intention to learn the words. However they pointed out that even though this kind of learning is incidental or unintentional, it is not unattended, that is, the students are not purposely trying to learn the vocabulary but their attention is called to the words they do not know. Laufer (2001) point out that incidental vocabulary learning should be defined in contrast to intentional learning. Intentional vocabulary acquisition refers to an activity aiming at committing lexical information to memory. Incidental vocabulary acquisition means that learners acquire the vocabulary incidentally when they are carrying through other learning tasks, e.g. reading articles, listening to English songs. According to Laufer (2003), incidental vocabulary acquisition can be defined as the acquisition of vocabulary as a by-product of any activity not explicitly geared to lexical acquisition. Incidental learning does not mean that the learners do not attend to the words during the task. They may attend to the words (for example, using them in sentences, or looking them up in the dictionary), but they do not deliberately try to commit these words to memory. Although many researchers have defined incidental vocabulary acquisition from different aspects, there is not an all-sided and authoritative definition of IVA. In this paper, the researcher will adopt the definition made by Laufer (2003) that incidental vocabulary acquisition refers to the acquisition of vocabulary as a by-product of any activity not explicitly geared to lexical acquisition. Few researchers have studied the relationship only between listening and incidental vocabulary acquisition, because generally listening and speaking cannot be separated. Elley (1989) designed two experiments to testify his assumption that young children can learn new vocabulary incidentally from illustrated storybooks read to them. The results show that oral story reading constitutes a significant source of vocabulary acquisition, whether or not the reading is accompanied by teacher explanation of word meanings. Duppy (1993) find that visual and listening can facilitate incidental vocabulary acquisition. After watching Eve minutes’ segment of a new movie, the subjects did a vocabulary test