ERIC Number: EJ1077034
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2013
Pages: 7
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1916-4742
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
Is Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Feasible to EFL Learning?
Luo, Jian-ping
English Language Teaching, v6 n10 p245-251 2013
For learning English as a foreign language, the efficiency of the approach of incidental vocabulary acquisition depends on the word frequency and text coverage. However, the statistics of English corpus reveals that English is a language that has a large vocabulary size but a low word frequency as well as text coverage, which is obviously not in favor of the approach. Also, the statistics reveals that, by learning English words from reading incidentally as the approach claims, the learners will have to add up their reading out of class to a large quantity as ten times as that in class. Accordingly, it will be too much for them to do and clearly it is unfeasible to these non-English major learners, who could not probably have time to spend in reading so much just for picking up new words incidentally. This paper aims to prove that the approach is not feasible at all to EFL learning in China.
Descriptors: Incidental Learning, Vocabulary Development, Computational Linguistics, English (Second Language), Second Language Learning, Foreign Countries, Reading Processes, Word Frequency, Second Language Instruction, Teaching Methods, Contrastive Linguistics, Language Tests, College Students, Instructional Effectiveness
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: China
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
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