The impact of reading on three aspects of word knowledge: spelling, meaning and collocation

This study investigates the degree to which intermediate EFL learners can acquire knowledge of spelling, meaning and collocation of 100 target words with different frequency from reading the authentic novel A Little Princess. The results show that the average number of acquired words was 16.52 or 25.54% and that there was improvement in all three aspects of word knowledge: spelling (15.34 words or 24.23%), meaning (16.5 words or 25.97%) and collocation (17.75 words or 26.44%). The word frequency affected the vocabulary learning gains. The biggest gains in all three aspects of word knowledge were found for words which occurred from 11 to 20 times in the novel. (c) 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd.