I've spent the past afternoon poring over the archives of Reading in a Foreign Language, a peer-reviewed internet journal dedicated to the issue of foreign language reading. There's some useful research there, I think, for anyone interested in second language literacy, and a number of articles on vocabulary acquisition just from exposure.
Of particular interest to me:
Lexical threshold revisited: Lexical text coverage, learners’ vocabulary size and reading comprehension
The background to this article on incidental vocabulary acquisition is interesting to me for how it suggests a donut hole effect for mid-frequency words, the words that really are useful and necessary to know, but don't necessarily come up frequently enough to stick in your mind just by reading a lot.
(Both articles are .pdfs, if anyone's bothered by that; most of the archives are available in HTML format, though).
Of particular interest to me:
Lexical threshold revisited: Lexical text coverage, learners’ vocabulary size and reading comprehension
The background to this article on incidental vocabulary acquisition is interesting to me for how it suggests a donut hole effect for mid-frequency words, the words that really are useful and necessary to know, but don't necessarily come up frequently enough to stick in your mind just by reading a lot.
(Both articles are .pdfs, if anyone's bothered by that; most of the archives are available in HTML format, though).
Edited: 2010-09-01, 10:09 pm