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Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Research Background
Vocabulary acquisition, a central task of second language acquisition (Lewis, 1993) isconsidered a life-long cognitive process. Words are the integral components of language and theunits to form larger structures such as sentences, paragraphs and the whole passages.Vocabulary has figured prominently in the competence of learners’ receptive and productiveskills of reading, listening, speaking and writing. Meanwhile, the mastery of vocabulary is alife-long cognitive process and an aim no one can absolutely achieve. As Nation (2001) puts it,learners find that many of their problems, receptive or productive, result from shortage ofvocabulary knowledge. At the same time, in the field of vocabulary teaching, the languageteachers are always in a dilemma. On the one hand, they might fully understand this need andtry to teach students as many new words as possible; on the other hand, it is impossible forthem to spend much time on vocabulary teaching. Hence, from a pedagogical point of view,there is clearly a need for research that helps to identify the types of learning tasks that provideoptimal opportunities for foreign language vocabulary learning. That’s why many researchersstart to focus on incidental vocabulary acquisition in varied respects. The term, incidentalvocabulary acquisition (IVA), which first becomes known in the field of second or foreignlanguage pedagogy as the by-product of reading (Krashen, 1989), refers to the learning inwhich learners pay attention to understanding in reading rather than the explicit goal of learningnew words and their acquisition of vocabulary is regarded as a by-product.
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1.2 Purpose and Significance of the Present Study
The purpose of the present research is to compare the effects of a composition task and aninteraction task on English vocabulary acquisition and analyze the results from the perspectiveof attention. In other words, the present study aims at finding out through which task thelearners’ attention can be drawn more significantly to the target words so that they couldacquire these words more effectively.The significance of the study could be both theoretical and practical. Theoretically, althoughmany researchers have done studies concerning attention, input, interaction and differentlanguage areas (e.g. Gass & Torres, 2005), attention and writing (e.g. Qi & Lapkin, 2001),attention and interaction (e.g. Gass, 1997), etc., there are comparatively few studies makingcomparisons among impacts of attention on foreign language vocabulary acquisition throughcomposition and interaction in listening activities.The exploration of the effectiveness of the two tasks on foreign language vocabularyacquisition may benefit learners and teachers of English in their future vocabulary learning andtheir course design or their test task design. Therefore, this study will contribute to learning orteaching practice inside and outside the classroom.
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Chapter Two Literature Review

2.1 Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition
Vocabulary acquisition plays a key role in foreign language learning. How vocabulary isacquired and what the most effective approach is for promoting efficient acquisition havearoused lines of investigations in the field of本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。