-
Comment on
“
The Study on the Effects of
Different Input Enhancement in Incidental
V
ocabulary Acquisition
through Reading
”
Chen Shanshan
Five
aspects
will
be
considered
in
reviewing
this
thesis,
namely,
research
topic
and
theme,
literature
review,
novelty
and
efficiency
of
the
research,
interpretation
between
the
theories
and
the
research
questions
and
the
thesis
writing
competence.
Besides, the
strengths
and weaknesses of the paper in
each
aspect
will
be talked in
detail.
Firstly, for the research
topic and theme, four research questions are
proposed in
studying the effects of
different input enhancement on IV
A
through reading. The aims
of the
research are to find out whether the input
enhancement has positive effects on
IV
A, which input enhancement
can be better facilitated in IV
A in the
immediate and
the
delayed
vocabulary
knowledge
scale
test
and
which
input
enhancement
can
be
better retained in long-
term memory. Therefore, the direction of the
research such as
research areas and
research questions is relatively specific and
clear.
Moreover, the
related
research
background
and
research
significance
are
also
presented
comparatively
explicit
in
the
first
chapter
of
the
thesis,
which
gave
us
the
obvious
expressions
that
the
topic
and
theme
of
this
thesis
have
specific
practical
values.
However,
in my personal view, the first significance of the
research stated in page two
that
“
this
study
will
provide
more
information
on
the
relationship
between
reading
and
IV
A
”
is
relatively departure from the research question,
and also the relationship
between
reading and
IV
A is not
discussed in the part of results design and
research
findings.
For
the
second
significance
of
the
research
that
“
subjects
in
the
previous
research
are
mostly
higher
level
students,
and
the
research
will
provide
more
information for the research on the
effect of input enhancement on IV
A to
lower level
subjects, vocational
students.
”
not clearly
discussed the reason of researching lower
level
students,
and
what
the
difference
between
the
higher
level
and
lower
level
students
and
what
the
differences
of
the
research
findings
between
the
previous
research on higher level students and
the present study on lower level students. Hence,
there are two questions of the
significance of this thesis here. We can not knew
that
whether there already
have some similar researches based on the lower
level students,
and whether the
findings of which are the same as the present
research.
Secondly,
for
the
part
of
literature
review,
three
parts
of
the
literature
review,
theoretical
framework,
terminology
and
related
research
at
home
and
abroad,
are
presented
in
chapter
two.
The
related
theoretical
terminology,
like
“
Noticing
Hypothesis, IV
A, input
enhancement and the relationship between the
IV
A and input
enhancement
”
and
previous
researches
and
research
tendencies
on
the
effect
of
different
input
enhancement
on
IV
A,
such
as
“
previous
research
based
on
many
different perspectives,
the effects of different reading tasks, vocabulary
frequency and
topic
familiarity.
Little
attention
is
paid
to
the
effects
of
input
enhancement
”
have
been
discussed
in
full
scale,
which
can
mostly
reflect
the
key
areas
and
research
questions
of
IV
A.
Besides,
for
the
summaries
of
interpretation
of
the
theoretical
terminology and the related research at
home and abroad such as sum-up of IV
A
on
page eight and summaries of related
studies at home and abroad on page fourteen and
seventeen
are
quite
necessary
and
clear
for
the
reader.
However,
there
still
have
some
weaknesses
of
the
part
of
literature
review.
In
interpreting
of
the
Schmidt
’
s
Noticing Hypothesis from page four to
five, the same
sentence that
“
noticing plays an
important
role to convert input to intake in the acquisition
process
”
emerged in three
paragraphs, which was redundancy in the
explanation of the terminology.
Besides,
the
last
paragraph
of
review
of
IV
A
on
the
page
eight
is
not
closely
related
to
the
above mentioned contents, which is
also redundancy in increasing the
length of the
paper.
In addition, the pattern of the
quotation is not agreed in the part of review of
the
related
research
abroad,
some
of
the
quotations
of
time
are
missing.
While
the
biggest
problem
of
the
literature
review
is
that
the
whole
contents
are
not
correspondent with the title in the
interpretation of the relationship between
IV
A and
Input Enhancement.
The holistic words here are the interpretation of
the
“
context
”
not
the explanation of the
relationship between IV
A and Input
Enhancement.
Thirdly,
for
the
novelty
and
efficiency
of
the
thesis,
the
research
questions,
research
design,
discussions
and
findings
have
some
innovation
and
the
research
findings have practical values. For
instance, the most innovative research question is
the fourth question that
“
which vocabulary
acquisition of the input enhancement can
be
better
retained
in
the
long-term
memory
”
,
which
reflects
the
most
obvious
difference
between
the
related
previous
research
and
also
provided
us
the
most
important
implications
of
this
thesis
that
“
teacher
should
advocate
students
to
use
English
gloss to
learn
vocabularies
”
.
Therefore,
this thesis
has
its practical
findings
and
values
like
different
input
enhancement
have
positive
effect
on
IV
A,
words
in
boldface
plus
English
gloss
can
be
better
retained
in
long-term
memory,
the
input
enhancement
in
reading
materials
for
the
learners
should
be
encouraged
and
the
teachers should choose
reading with different input enhancement devices
according to
the proficiency of the
learners. Personally, the research questions may
equal to what is
the
contents
and
what
will
be
demonstrated
in
the
holistic
paper.
Therefore,
the
innovative research
question also reflects the novel findings of the
research. For the
research
design,
the
participants,
instruments
and
procedure
are
all
presented
in
a
quite logical way. The
participants of the research are the 120 freshmen
in two parallel
classes
from
Wuhu
vocational
and
Technical
College,
and
those
participants
are
divided into four groups
with 30 in each and each group contains the same
number of
high,
intermediate
and
low
vocabulary
level
students.
The
reasonable
part
of
the
grouping
is that is convenience to the compliment of the
four types of different input
enhancements, while the participants
are not representative in the lower level
students,
which
results
in
the
lower
convincing
and
persuasive
of
the
research
findings.
The
instruments
like
the
vocabulary
level
test,
immediate
vocabulary
test
and
delayed
vocabulary
test
are
all
borrowed
from
the
previous
research
achievements,
so
it
is
undoubted for its validity and
reliability.
However, there
are two suspicious for the
research
procedure. the first questions is about target
words chosen,
“
The author
asks
6 students, each two of whom
represent high, immediate and low English
proficiency
level
whether
they
have
known
these
words
or
not,
the
teacher
picks
the
unknown
words which are unknown to all of
them.
”
, which can not
guarantee the validity and
reliability
of
the
words
chosen
by
the
author
and
what
the
principles
the
author
utilized
is
not
stated
in
this
part.
The
second
question
is
about
the
reading
comprehension
exercise,
“
this
reading
exercise
lasts
six
weeks
and
each
week