The Effect of Exposure Frequency and Reading Comprehension on Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition and Retention Through Reading for Learners of German as a Foreign Language

312 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1997.The results indicated that intermediate language learners acquire a significant amount of vocabulary incidentally during reading after only two exposures, and that receptive as well as productive gains are moderately to strongly related to learners' text comprehension. It was further found that two or four exposures resulted in fairly similar vocabulary gain but that six exposures produced higher vocabulary gains. Although subjects who had been exposed to the target words in text retained significantly more vocabulary than subjects who had not encountered the target words in context, retention measures for these same subjects produced mixed results: On productive vocabulary knowledge three reading treatment groups displayed a significant rate of retention and three reading treatment groups displayed a significant decrease in retained vocabulary. On receptive vocabulary knowledge all but one experimental group retained vocabulary over four weeks.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD