An Experimental Study On The Effects Of Different Listening Tasks On Senior High School Students' Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

How to enlarge second language learners' vocabulary size is one of the critical problems for second language acquisition(SLA)researches.Many researchers have testified the feasibility of incidental vocabulary acquisition(IVA)through reading.But studies on IVA in listening process are few.Listening and reading are two important modes of language input.Whether learners can acquire vocabulary knowledge and increase their vocabulary size in the process of listening training is worthy of further study.Furthermore,whether different listening tasks with varied involvement loads will affect learners' vocabulary acquisition effects needs to be examined by empirical studies as well.Thus,based on the Input Hypothesis,Output Hypothesis and Involvement Load Hypothesis(ILH),the present study aims to explore the influence that different listening tasks with varied involvement loads exert on IVA.Two research questions are put forward.1.Can listening tasks with different involvement loads exert influence on senior high school students' IVA?2.What are the effects of different listening tasks on senior high school students' receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge acquisition?61 high school students of Senior One from a high school in Guangzhou were selected as the participants.They were randomly divided into two experimental groups.Each of the groups was randomly distributed to listen to the same listening material and then finish the True or False questions and Fill-in tasks respectively in ten minutes.There were 10 target words which are chosen from the listening material.After the subjects finishing the listening tasks,the immediate and delayed vocabulary tests were carried out follow by.The time intervals between the two tests were one week.The revised vocabulary knowledge scale(VKS)was adopted to explore the acquisition effects in terms of the productive and receptive vocabulary knowledge.The results of the research were analyzed by the Statistical Package for the Social Science(SPSS)20.0.The results of immediate test showed that listening tasks withvaried involvement loads exert different effects on senior high school students' vocabulary acquisition,and the higher involvement load task(Fill-in group)performed better than the True or False question group in terms of both receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge.The results of the delayed test demonstrate that there were significant differences on the vocabulary retention effects between the two groups.As for the retention effects of the receptive and productive vocabulary acquisition,there was significant difference in the productive vocabulary retention aspect of the two groups,but the significant difference was not found in receptive vocabulary retention effect of the two groups.The findings of the research only partially supported the Involvement Load Hypothesis.Comparing the results of immediate test with those of the delayed test,we find that there is a dramatic decrease of the retention of acquired words.Based on the above findings,the following pedagogical implications are brought about: Firstly,senior high school students can acquire vocabulary knowledge through listening training,and different tasks exert different effects on incidental vocabulary acquisition.Effective vocabulary learning tasks should be set up in listening training.Secondly,frequent review is essential to vocabulary learning,teachers should offer more chance for students to review the acquired vocabulary knowledge in time.