초록 열기/닫기 버튼
With the importance of vocabulary knowledge in language development more fully appreciated, a great deal of studies have been done on incidental vocabulary learning through (extensive) reading. Yet, few studies have attempted to analyze how the size of incidentally learnable vocabulary changes as the amount of reading increases, a question which, if answered properly, can greatly help language learners and their teachers to stay motivated in the long process of learning a foreign language by letting them know how much vocabulary learning they can expect as they keep on reading. The main goal of this study is to explain the relationship between the amount of reading and the resulting incidental vocabulary learning. To attain this goal, a corpus of English chapter books was built using the texts of three best-selling chapter book series (Junie B. Jones, A to Z Mysteries, and Magic Tree House). By analyzing this corpus, the following three research questions have been explored: (a) how many words are repeated enough in each book to meet the condition for incidental vocabulary learning, and how the number changes as the amount of reading increases, (b) how much reading is required to acquire knowledge of at least 98% of the running words in each series (often assumed to be needed for adequate comprehension), and (c) how much vocabulary in a major word list such as NGSL and NAWL can be incidentally learned through reading each chapter book series.
