Recently, PhD Student Li Zan (the first author) and Professor Wu Shiyu (corresponding author), from the School of Foreign Languages of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, published an academic paper titled "Reading multiple texts or reading the same text multiple times? The effect of contexts in story reading on incidental L2 vocabulary acquisition" in Foreign Language Teaching and Research (Issue 2, 2023).

This paper was the result of the initial stage of the research of the National Social Science Foundation Project "Text-Mining Based on the mechanism of foreign language teachers' classroom discourse’s learning facilitation efficacy" (22BYY096).

The article pointed out that vocabulary was the basis for learners to understand and express a second language (foreign language), and therefore constituted the backbone of second language learning. Studies found that learners who learned a foreign language after learning their native language needed to master at least 8,000 to 9,000 English words in order to understand original English literature and newspapers. Chinese English learners had already received systematical grammar training of English before entering college. Therefore, the main goal of their college English learning was to expand their vocabulary and improve their understanding and expression ability. Which learning style was most conducive to the acquisition of foreign language vocabulary had been the focus of academic attention.

As the ancient saying goes, "If you read a book a hundred times, its meaning will appear by itself". That was, repeated reading without any explanation can help understand the text’s knowledge and morality. However, did this traditional learning method with emphasis on repeated reading can be applied to the vocabulary learning of Chinese English learners? Through an interesting story reading experiment in English, this study explored the question of which way learners can better acquire vocabulary through story reading (reading multiple articles containing the same target word, repeating the same material containing the target word many times).

Taking Chinese EFL learners as participants, this study examined the relationship between context variation and L2 word learning and the effect of the learners’ story comprehension ability on the relationship. Fifty-two no-English major undergraduate students from a key university in China took part in the experiment. First, they read 36 stories in three varied contexts (multiple texts) or read the same stories thrice (multiple times), and then completed an immediate-post vocabulary test and a delayed-post vocabulary test. The results indicated that contexts played a siginificant role in participants’ learning of decontextualized explicit vocabulary knowledge and the mapping from word form to its meaning. Participants who read multiple texts perfromed significantly better than those who read multiple times. However, a multiplex picture emerged regarding the role of contexts in the learning of context-cued vocabulary knowledge. The effect of contexts was moderated by the participants’ story comprehension ability and test time. The findings of the present study provide further evidence supporting the context variation hypothesis and show pedagogical implicatins for foreign language teaching and learning.