The evidence of different learning environment learning effects on vocabulary size and reading comprehension

Abstract

The nature of the effect of learning environments' language setting on second language receptive vocabulary acquisition in both adolescent receptive vocabulary acquisition and reading comprehension performance was explored in a continuous 10-month longitudinal study. The current study divided 170 adolescents into four groups. Their reading comprehension ability and receptive vocabulary size were each measured in two different periods. The results showed that single Chinese instructional learning and single English instructional learning contributed more to students' receptive vocabulary size than bilingual instructional language materials. The results imply that the immersion hypothesis has more positive impact on improving second language receptive vocabulary size acquisition and reading comprehension performance than the depth of processing hypothesis.