An Empirical Study Of The Relationship Between ESP Academic Listening And Vocabulary Acquisition

English for Specific Purposes (ESP) is a major language learning activity around the world today since it emerged in the 1960s. And ESP vocabulary is an especially important consideration in the matter of ESP (Wallace, 1982). For learners of English as a Second or Foreign Language (ESL/EFL), the major difficulty for them when they shift from English for General Purposes (EGP) field to ESP field is the specialized vocabulary (ESP vocabulary). The fundamental role of ESP vocabulary in the comprehension or production in the ESP study can not be denied. On the other hand, current pedagogical trends emphasize incidental or indirect vocabulary learning by resorting to contextual cues, and it is widely believed that it is sufficient to place learners in an authentic language environment for them to infer the meanings of unfamiliar words from oral language. Since ESP learners in the Chinese context lack opportunities for exposure to the types of spoken language experience that native speakers enjoy, but modern college students are more and more frequently exposed to a variety of ESP academic lectures, it seems worth researching into whether the Chinese ESP learners can discover the meanings of ESP vocabulary by listening to ESP academic lectures.To achieve the purpose of deciding whether listening to ESP academic lectures can result in ESP vocabulary acquisition, an experiment, in which the participants were all from Hunan Business University, was conducted. The theoretical basis of the present experiment includes Krashen's (1985) Input Hypothesis, Nagy, Herman & Anderson's (1985) Incidental Vocabulary Learning Hypothesis (IVLH) and Long's (1981) Interaction Hypothesis. And the experiment tracks the acquisition of ESP vocabulary using a recently developed instrument, the Vocabulary Knowledge Scale (Paribakht & Wesche 1993)(but slight changes are made by the author). The research aims at answering the following questions.1. Can listening to ESP academic lectures result in vocabulary gain for theChinese ESP learners?2. If acquisition does occur, what is the relationship between word types(academic words and technical words) and their acquisition through listening to lectures?3. If acquisition does occur, can ESP vocabulary knowledge acquired beretained in long-term memory?4. If acquisition does occur, what is the relationship between learners' lecture comprehension degree and their ESP vocabulary acquisition?5. If acquisition does occur, what is the relationship between learners' L2listening proficiency and their ESP vocabulary acquisition? In order to answer the above research questions, in the experiment three pre-tests, three immediate post-tests, and one delayed post-test of the target words were given to the participants. After collection of the scores of each of the vocabulary tests, the statistic tool— SPSS ( Statistical Package for Social Science) version 11.0 was employed to analyze the raw data.Through the statistical analysis, we have come to the following conclusions:1. Listening to ESP academic lectures in the EFL context can be regarded as a means of ESP vocabulary acquisition.2. The participants acquired more technical vocabulary knowledge than academic vocabulary knowledge.3. A significant difference is found between delayed post- test and the pre-tests, showing that although only part of the ESP vocabulary gain was retained in the memory after four weeks, the vocabulary knowledge retained was still superior to the knowledge the participants had before listening to the lectures.4. The interaction effect between lecture comprehension degree and ESP vocabulary acquisition is found to be significant; the higher degree of lecture comprehension, the greater ESP vocabulary knowledge gains.5. Learners' L2 listening proficiency has a statistically significant impact on their ESP vocabulary knowledge gains, the higher their L2 listening...