Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition from Reading an Authentic Text

A number of studies have demonstrated that second/foreign language learners can acquire vocabulary from reading. This study was designed to examine whether advanced EFL learners can acquire vocabulary incidentally from reading an authentic text. Eighteen first-year English major students read and listened to the first eight chapters of Pride and Prejudice. Fifty-one words that appeared between two and ten times in the text were selected as targets. The pretest showed that on average, the participants knew the meaning of 26.9 of the target words. Results showed that participants learned the meaning of 24% of the unknown target words, or one in four words. There were no significant differences in the acquisition rates between participants with different vocabulary sizes. The vocabulary learning gains were, to a certain extent, affected by the words frequency in the text and their general frequency