There is a notion that words can be learned incidentally by context. However this research shows that few new words appear to be learned from this type of reading, and half of them are soon lost.
The results show that words can be learned incidentally but that most of the words were not learned. More frequent words were more likely to be learned and were more resistant to decay. The data suggest that, on average, the meaning of only one of the 25 items will be remembered after three months, and the meaning of none of the items that were met fewer than eight times will be remembered three months later.
Keywords: guessing vocabulary from context, vocabulary acquisition, graded readers,
occurrence rate, vocabulary decay, vocabulary attrition, extensive reading
Rob Waring,Misako Takaki; Japan, October 2003
