Name: Does Extensive Reading Help Vocabulary Acquisition?
Uploaded: 2018-02-01T15:48:17.000Z
Duration: 5 min 55 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

So today we're gonna talk about vocabulary learning.

Vocabulary learning is somehow tedious, boring...

Especially when you have to memorize from a word list.

Some teachers would suggest students to just.....read more!

When you learn vocabulary while reading, this is called incidental acquisition.

So past research has shown that the number of the word that is seen by the learner determines

whether or not he or she remembers this word or retain it long term.

Our question for today is: does extensive reading help vocabulary acquisition?

Profesor Horst did a research on second language vocabulary acquisition.

So today we're gonna look at the research and its results and see ...... My cat......

So professor Horst did a research on students learning second language vocabulary through

And today we're gonna look at the research and its results and see what the learners

21 adult ESL students at a community center in Montreal were chosen.

They took a 100-item pre-reading word knowledge test before they started their extensive reading

50 words are words that the learners should have known, along with 50 unfamiliar words

that are more likely to be learned from the reading instead of other sources.

After the program started, students choose books of their level and interest.

Upon finishing the reading, the participants took another 100-item post-test to test their

All the participants got a higher score on the post-test after the extensive reading

They learned about 17 new words throughout the 6 weeks.

10 of the words are from the 50 unfamiliar word list, which means that they acquired

these ten words through the extensive reading.

So from this research, we can conclude that extensive reading does help the acquisition

And now we can think about what the learners can take away from this research.

Number one, learning 17 new words from a book uh...throughout 6 weeks.....I would say it's

not a very promising way to learn vocabulary.

So if you're looking for rapid growth in your vocabulary, extensive reading might not be

But extensive reading has another benefit.

It is that you could recognize frequently seen words more quickly.

In other words, you could increase your reading speed.

This is what a lot of people want and you can do this through extensive reading.

Extensive reading helps you increase your reading speed, at the same time, you could

Number two, are the students going to remember these words learned from the reading in the

So reviewing is still a really important part and in this research, the post-test was given

to the students right after they read the book.

Maybe that's why they scored impressively.

Anyways, if you want to remember vocabulary for a long time, you still have to review,

Number three, the most important takeaway is that when you want to read extensively,

try to find a book that is of your level and also a topic that you're interested in.

In this research, all the participants read something that they're interested in and that

I think that also helped them acquire vocabulary incidentally because you would have the momentum

to keep on reading instead of feeling lost or feeling not being challenged at all.

So picking the right book is really important when you try to read extensively.

There's no clear conclusion regarding to the number of the encounters for vocabulary acquisition,

which is not surprising because it really depends on the readers' language proficiency

For example, if the new word is not lexicalized in the learners' first language, which means

that in the learners' first language, there's no equivalent or direct translation of the

It may make it kind of difficult for the learner to remember what it means.

So there are many factors that contribute to incidental acquisition.

But what we can learn from this research is that extensive reading has more benefits than

So this is pretty much it for this video.

There would be more videos about second language acquisition research that's coming up.

Don't forget to subscribe to this channel and click the like button if you like it.

I would link all the reference that I used in this video down in the description box

Ahhh I think that's pretty much it~~~isn't it?