Can learners acquire new vocabulary incidentally through reading? This study investigates how university ESL students acquire new lexical knowledge as a byproduct of reading thematically related texts. It explores the strategies and knowledge sources used when encountering unfamiliar words. This research analyzes introspective data from ESL students, finding that they often ignore a significant proportion of new words. For those words they attend to, inferencing emerges as the primary strategy. The study develops a taxonomy of knowledge sources used for inferring word meanings from textual and other cues, providing a framework for understanding learners' inferencing behavior. The findings contribute to research and theory on incidental vocabulary acquisition within an input-processing framework, offering pedagogical implications for language teaching and curriculum design.
This paper aligns well with the scope of Studies in Second Language Acquisition by investigating the incidental acquisition of L2 vocabulary through reading. The research contributes to understanding the cognitive processes involved in language learning and offers pedagogical insights relevant to second language educators and researchers.