Acquiring vocabulary through reading: A replication of the Golden Fleece study

A number of studies on incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading have shown that learners can acquire vocabulary while reading for meaning. This paper presents the results of a replication study carried out with secondary school students in Macedonia, who read the authentic text The Golden Fleece. The study used a pretest-posttest design in order to find out how much vocabulary the participants can learn from reading the story. They were tested on 30 words which appeared with different frequency in the text. The pretest results showed that on average the participants knew the meaning of 18 of the 30 target words. The average number of learned words was 3.02 or 25.16%. The vocabulary size did not play any role in the rate of learning the meaning of the unknown words. There was a moderate correlation between the relative gain scores and the frequency of the words in the text.