Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

Vocabulary knowledge is one of the important factors in respect of communicative competence and it’s not much different from second language learning. As Mediha and Enisa (2014) point out, communication cannot take place without having enough vocabulary. Vocabulary learning was considered as a process conducted by explicit memorization. Now, however, there is believe that not all of vocabulary knowledge is explicit; some can be acquired implicitly. And the issue of vocabulary acquisition has gotten a spotlight not only to learners but also to researchers, so that there are substantial studies about vocabulary acquisition. Notwithstanding lots of experiments have been attempted to find the most effective way of teaching and learning a second

There are many studies which evaluated the effectiveness of the vocabulary learning strategies. There has been some consideration which says that vocabulary acquisition has to be processed as a result of incidental learning, not the intentional learning. And one theoretical stance arguing incidental L2 vocabulary learning is the Involvement Load Hypothesis (Laufer & Hulstijn, 2001). It says there are three important factors for incidental vocabulary acquisition; need, search and evaluation. And it says, the stronger those three factors are given the longer lexical retention will be. Need refers to motivational component. For example, when it is imposed by the task the need can be considered as moderate. On the other hand, when it is imposed by the learner himself the need is considered as strong. Search refers to the effort of learners to find the meaning when they encounter the L2 unknown words. Evaluation entails a comparison of a new word to the other word so as to find the fitness in a given text. Focus on form is also seen as a one way of increasing the involvement load to help learners to retain the vocabulary easier and