Abstract
This study was intended to determine whether or not the genre of a reading text affects the incidental vocabulary acquisition of L2 learners while reading. To this aim, 40 Iranian EFL students whose vocabulary knowledge was within a limited range (already determined by Nation’s Vocabulary Levels Test) were divided into two groups of 20 each for the reading sections. The Narrative Group comprised the participants who read the narratives, and the Expository Group were those who read the expository texts. Three types of vocabulary tests (i.e., Form recognition, Meaning translation and Multiple-choice items) were administered after the reading sessions to assess the incidental vocabulary gains of the participants. Overall, this study demonstrated the relative superiority of expository texts over narratives in terms of enhancing readers' incidental acquisition of unknown words. It is argued that depending on the genre of a text, readers will invest processing resources with different depths and varying degrees of cognitive elaboration for the task of comprehension.
Highlights
Along with the previous studies, this paper is intended to investigate, from a text analysis point of view, the effect that the two most common text genres to EFL learners, namely narrative and expository, may have on their potential incidental vocabulary acquisition
The independent variable was the genre of the text while the dependant variable was the students’ incidental acquisition of the meaning of the target words
Since any incidental vocabulary acquisition from reading is intricately interwoven with and related to text comprehension, as this has been repeatedly pointed out by Pulido (2007), it seems in order to start the discussion from an understanding of overall text comprehension as well as the mechanisms involved in this process and use this understanding as a basis in order to discuss the main dimensions of incidental vocabulary acquisition from a genre analysis point of view
Summary
Along with the previous studies, this paper is intended to investigate, from a text analysis point of view, the effect that the two most common text genres to EFL learners, namely narrative and expository, may have on their potential incidental vocabulary acquisition. The literature on incidental vocabulary acquisition has witnessed a great diversity of, and sometimes controversial, views held by various researchers. Gass (1999) introduces factors that are involved in learning vocabulary in a schematic representation that captures the difference between incidental and intentional learning. Reider (2003), relying on Schmidt’s (1990) and Ellis’s (1994b) definitions of the concept of ‘consciousness’, attributes all these confusions regarding the difference between implicit and incidental learning to the inconsistent use and unclear status of this term noted by various researchers in the literature. If we consider consciousness as awareness, we will have explicit learning in the presence of consciousness and implicit learning in its absence
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