TerriChen wrote "My feeling is that too many unknown vocabulary in the text and the incidentaol vocabulary teaching might hinder students' comprehension. On the other hand, "how should we interpret the text?"
To me, I think that if there are too many new vocabulary words in a reading, it means that that particular reading is too difficult for the level of the students. If there are only a few new words in a reading, teachers can pre-teach them or have students guess the meanings according to the content. In real life,
people read for learning, information, and pleasure. Focusing on grammar and vocabulary only during reading may make it seem boring and scare students away from reading more. In a reading classroom, a teacher should have studetns read for a purpose ( for informtation or for pleasure), and for meaning! We should
avoid having students think that they read because they need to learn grammar and vocabulary. Indeed, students learn a lot of the language through reading. Another thing we can do with reading is teaching lexical phrases. We can point out some of the chunks or phrases from a reading text and make them salient by,say, highlighting them. This way, it will raise students' consciousness while they are reading for meaning! After reading the text for meaning, we can work on the lexical phrases by giving more examples to students.

Cathy Wong

MA Applied Linguistics students
Texas Tech University
chiu-yin.wong@ttu.edu