Effects Of Input Frequency On L2Learners’ Discourse Comprehension And Vocabulary Acquisition Under Different Input Modalities

In the field of second language learning, frequency is a concerned concept. Frequency is not only adistribution law of language characteristic, but also individual’s experience of language contact. One’sexperience of language contact is practice frequency or number of repetition (Harrington&Dennis,2002:261). The frequency in this study mainly refers to the number of repetition. According to the secondlanguage acquisition theory of Ellis (2002:178-179), frequency is the conclusive factor of languagelearning. Schmidt (1992:372) also claimed that the practice frequency promoted the development of one’slanguage ability, and called the promotion as knowledge strengthening. Other scholars, however, pointedout that practice frequency could only promote the improvement of some language skills, and its effectswere limited (Eubank&Gregg,2002:238). So the scholars didn’t reach an agreement about the effects ofpractice frequency in the field of second language acquisition. This study, as a result, mainly explored theeffects of frequency on the second language learners’ discourse comprehension and vocabulary acquisitionunder different input models.This study mainly discussed the influence of input frequency on discourse comprehension andvocabulary acquisition under different modalities. There are three research questions in this study:(1) Howdid input frequency influence discourse comprehension of second language learners under different inputmodality?(2) How did input frequency influence vocabulary learning of second language learners underdifferent input modality?(3) Under different input modality, can input frequency influence have the sameinfluence on both discourse comprehension and vocabulary learning simultaneously?The present study firstly presented purposes and significance of this study, reviewed the previousresearch on the effects of input frequency and modalities on discourse comprehension and vocabularyacquisition both at home and abroad, and then provided the theory foundations of the study: dynamicsystems theory and information process theory, lastly described the research methodology in details,including the research questions, subjects, instruments and procedures of the study. Six freshmannon-English major students, which came from Hainan University in China participated the experiment.Reading proficiency and listening proficiency of the six students were the same.They were divided intothree groups randomly and allocated to audio group, visual group, and visual-audio group. The researcherstransferred the English language in video episode into English transcript, and changed the sound and wordsof the video into fixed-time ppt., which were presented in three ways: audio, visual and visual-audio. In theseven experiment periods, visual group read the passage; audio group listened to the record of the passage; audio-visual group need to read the passage while listening to the record of the passage. After finishing thepassage within the fixed time, the participants would do a text for the understanding of the passage andwrite down in Chinese about their understanding of the text in the discourse comprehension on text paper.And the participants were asked to have a self-assessment of their master of the target and non-target wordsby using VKS. The subjects did the experimental tasks in the morning of seven days. Then their data ofcomprehension and vocabulary acquisition were collected. The results of the study were as followings:(1)Input frequency had an obvious effect on second language learners’ discourse understanding in differentmodalities. With the increase of input frequency, the score of discourse understanding was increasing butnot steady. Meanwhile, the subjects’ deep understanding of the discourse was increasing steadily. Theresults of the experiment also showed that the effect of frequency played a very important role at thebeginning of the learning process, but its effect decrease later.(2) The effects of input frequency on thesecond language learners’ vocabulary acquisition were very apparent. With the increase of input frequency,the second language learners’ mastery of the words improved from the receptive knowledge to productiveknowledge. It can be observed that the effect of input frequency on the receptive knowledge was strongerthan on the productive knowledge. The scores of the participants’ vocabulary acquisition under the visualand visual-audio modes were better than that under the audio mode when the input frequencies are the same.(3) The comprehensive vocabulary knowledge of the second language learners didn’t improve with theincrease of input frequency and discourse understanding. This was caused by the different characters of thereceptive knowledge and productive knowledge. For the receptive knowledge, it improved with theincrease of discourse comprehension. The productive knowledge, however, was related to the inputinformation and the competition of the attention resource.