ABSTRACT
The present chapter presents an overview of incidental vocabulary learning in the foreign language (FL). Incidental acquisition of vocabulary is a common phenomenon, especially in the L1, where most of the words are acquired incidentally as the by-product of other communicative, that is, meaning-oriented activities such as reading or essay writing. In the FL, incidental vocabulary acquisition, with a meaning-oriented focus, also plays an outstanding role. Different theoretical strands have dealt with the issue of incidental vocabulary learning trying to account for how words are acquired as the result of communicative activities. Myriad studies have explored the effectiveness of these meaning-oriented activities in incidental vocabulary acquisition. Here, a review of these studies will precede an account of activities and examples. What characterizes incidental vocabulary acquisition is that the focus during acquisition is on meaning and not on (word) form; thus, vocabulary is incorporated as the result of accomplishing another communicative activity. Finally, we will provide with some illustrative activities for incidental learning of vocabulary in L2 Spanish. We will show how Spanish as a Foreign Language (SFL) teachers can make the most of their classes by using specific communicative activities that can contribute to increasing the lexical repertoire of the students.
