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Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Background of the Study
Vocabulary is regarded as a significant aspect of language learning and teaching by most researchersand scholars abroad and at home. It is also considered as the basic unit to make up longer and largerstructures, like sentences and passages. Wilkins (1972:11) stated that “while without grammar very littlecan be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed.” Because of its significance of conveyinginformation, vocabulary has attracted more attention from linguists, researchers and scholars especially inrecent years. So studies which are used to investigate vocabulary learning of either first language or secondlanguage have sprung up and become more numerous. With the increase of attention, most teachers find abig problem when they are teaching that is how to efficiently teach new vocabulary in limited class time.Focused on dealing with this problem, numerous researchers and educators tried their best to do researchesto investigate vocabulary learning in the process of developing a language. They also made great efforts toconduct a series of studies to find out distinctive theories which could be used to teach learners to develop alanguage beneficially and efficiently. Based on the importance of vocabulary learning or acquisition todevelop a language, many educators have made great efforts to do studies to examine and testify theirtheories or hypothesis about it. Since the last decades, second language acquisition has become a key issuein language learning. Because of the efforts made by researchers and attention made by scholars andeducators, new and advanced theories have been made from various aspects especially in vocabularylearning and teaching. Incidental vocabulary acquisition is one of these advanced theories mentioned above.Incidental vocabulary acquisition which is considered as an important part of vocabulary learning andteaching has been the key method to do studies to investigate vocabulary learning in second language.
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1.2 Purpose and Significance of the Study
English has been regarded as one of the most important languages in the world because it is usedglobally and officially. So there are more and more people who try their best to learn English well. But howcan learners learn English well? This is the big problem in the process of developing English languagewhich makes many teachers and educators annoyed all the time. To deal with this problem efficiently, a lotof researchers and educators make every effort to find out and explain what happened while learninglanguage depending on previous theories and methods put forward by famous researchers and educators. Inthis study, theories concerning second language vocabulary acquisition is adopted to interpret what learnerscan acquire and to what extent the given tasks and methods affect incidental vocabulary acquisition whilefinishing other activities. During recent years, many empirical studies have been done to investigateincidental vocabulary acquisition and most of them are done through reading. So more studies on differentfactors affecting incidental vocabulary acquisition efficiently are still needed, especially those based onChinese context. This study is based on the effect of topic familiarity and input methods on incidentalvocabulary acquisition with the purpose of investigating the number of acquired new words and theretention of them through these t