The Role of Grammatical Word Class in Second Language Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Through Reading

250 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2004.Results showed a difference in learners' initial gain and retention of grammatical class and word meaning, with evidence of greater gain and retention of grammatical class than word meaning. This finding indicates that certain categories of syntactic lexical information, such as grammatical class, may be learned more readily than conceptual information. Statistical analyses revealed that although the grammatical class of the target words did not significantly impact learners' gain and retention of grammatical class, a significant interaction occurred between the variables of text type and the target words' grammatical class. Learners acquired grammatical class for significantly more nouns in one text, and for significantly more verbs in the other text. The interface between text and grammatical class may have positively influenced learners' acquisition of the target words' grammatical class. Further statistical analyses showed that text comprehension had an insignificant effect upon gain and retention of grammatical class and word meaning. Topic familiarity was determined to have an insignificant effect upon gain and retention of grammatical class, while its effect on the gain and retention of word meaning was undetermined.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD