Effects of Graded Texts on EFL College Students' Incidental ...

Abstract
Incidental vocabulary learning while extensive reading has been regarded as
common for adults’ life-long learning <strong>of</strong> a foreign language. Extensive reading is
therefore encouraged to L2 learners for enhancing vocabulary ability. However,
while reading, L2 learners <strong>of</strong>ten struggle with their lack <strong>of</strong> sufficient word knowledge
necessary for precise guessing <strong>of</strong> word meanings and the ample opportunities to
encounter words repeatedly within various contexts required for more complicated
word development. Preparing texts reaching adequate familiar word coverage for
specific groups <strong>of</strong> learners and at the same time ensuring sufficient repetition for
target words is <strong>of</strong>ten challenging. With the help <strong>of</strong> word lists research and the
advances <strong>of</strong> quantitative corpus analyses using word frequency computer programs,
texts with i+1 (comprehensible input) are easier to obtain. By incorporating various
online tools, an effectiveness research study <strong>of</strong> using an online extensive reading
program with careful control <strong>of</strong> vocabulary difficulty and repetitive target word
exposure was conducted.
This study originated from an exploratory issue <strong>of</strong> what happens to the English
teaching process when we incorporate an online extensive reading syllabus with
graded texts for vocabulary acquisition purposes. The online extensive reading
syllabus was developed by graded texts, gloss, a bilingual concordancer, and
highlights <strong>of</strong> target words. With four word lists, the General Service Word List, the
Senior High Student’s Word List in Taiwan, the University Word List, and a high
frequent word list, a text grader program filtered articles based on vocabulary
difficulty out <strong>of</strong> the original 5008 articles <strong>of</strong> a parallel corpus, Sinorama. Easier
texts were sequenced first to provide texts with i+1 and repetitive exposure <strong>of</strong> target
words was ensured to induce quality incidental vocabulary acquisition. The online
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