A Study Of Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition In Audio-Visual Context

Researches on incidental vocabulary acquisition are prosperousrecently, with a great many focused on picking words through extensivereading. This paper, which is categorized as an empirical study, has madea thorough exploration to IVA (incidental vocabulary acquisition) inaudio-visual context, therefore, a prior investigation to IVA through otherchannels.With careful experimental design, this research has investigatedthree learning factors (i.e. present vocabulary size, backgroundknowledge and task requirement) that influence IVA in audio-visualcontext, attempting to answer the following research questions:1. Can Chinese EFL learners acquire words incidentally while watching authentic English films?2. Does learners' present vocabulary size have impact on IVA?3. Does learners' backgrotmd knowledge have impact on IVA?4. Do different learning tasks affect their IVA?Sixty sophomores majoring in English attended this experiment.After watching two English film segments, each fifteen minutes, the subjects were given unexpected vocabulary tests. We then made use of SPSS 10.0 as statistic tool to analyze the raw data, and interpreted the results with Mclaughlin's ,'Information Processing Model" and Laufer & Hulstijn's "Involvement Load Hypothesis". The research findings are summarized below:1. The students can acquire some target words'while watching authentic films with the help of English caption.2. Learners' present vocabulary size and the speed to activate relevant vocabulary knowledge are of equal importance to IVA in audio-visual context. As observed in this. study, the participants who have a large general vocabulary size but insensitive to on-going L2 sound stream failed to perform well in IVA tests.3. Learners'background knowledge has impact on IVA. Generally speaking, the participants demonstrate better IVA gains when dealing with schema-matching learning materials than with non-matching ones. But the difference is less obvious in terms of high-level listeners than in terms of low-level ones. We interviewed both high-level students and low-level students,deducing the possible explanation as follows: strong"bottom-up"processing ability enables the high-level listeners to perform skillfully in various topic situation; while low -level listeners, weak in this ability, are incapable of making full use of the linguistic clues in unfamiliar materials for word inferring.4. Learning tasks play a significant role in vocabulary gaining and retention.In 2001, Laufer and Hulstijn proposed a motivational-cognitive construct of involvement, consisting of three basic components: need,search and evaluation, with,absence of a factor marked as O, a moderate presence as 1 and a strong presence as 2. Combination of these factors constitutes what they call"involvement load". Basic contention of Involvement Load Hypothesis is that tasks differ in the involvement load they generate; the greater the involvement load in processing the word,the higher the possibility of long-term retention.In this study, we have compared two learning tasks--- sentence paraphrasing and story retelling, with the finding that the former outperformed the latter in its role to facilitate IVA. According to Involvement Load Hypothesis, it is because involvement load contained in the former is much higher. Or to put it in another way, the sentence-paraphrasing task evokes inevitable processing of target words; but in the story-retelling task, learners purposely avoid using the newly acquired words, therefore, do not actually put the output activity into practice as the instructor has expected.The present study has great theoretical and practical significance in EFL teaching and learning. First, it has proved that acquiring words while watching authentic English films is possible for Chinese EFL learners,and may appear to be more attractive than the traditional way of extensive reading. Second, English teachers should pay attention to material selection, and equip the students with wide world knowledge as a premise to good inferring ability in audio-visual context. The last but not least,suitable learning tasks should be given in order to direct selective attention and foster students'retention of target words.