Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition In A Video-Watching Based Classroom Model

Nowadays, with the rapid development of multimedia technique, original English movies are widely used in our teaching of English. When students are watching them, they can acquire some new words through understanding the content of the watching material and guessing the meaning of the scripts, i.e. incidental vocabulary acquisition. The current paper investigated how different watching purposes affect learner's incidental vocabulary acquisition among 51 non-English majors. It tried to answer the following questions according to the final result: 1. Is it possible for the Chinese non-English majors to acquire vocabulary incidentally when they are watching videos in class? 2. Do different watching purposes affect their incidental vocabulary acquisition? 3. If the answer to the second question is positive,then how do different watching purposes affect their incidental vocabulary acquisition? 4. Does the factor of learner's vocabulary size affect their incidental vocabulary acquisition?The result showed most learners gained some incidental vocabulary acquisition when they were watching movies with English subtitles; different watching purposes did have some impacts on learner's incidental vocabulary acquisition; generally speaking, the purpose of"retell the story"gained the most word acquisition, followed by the purposes of"answer the questions"and"just watch". What's more, learners with large vocabulary size tended to have better incidental vocabulary acquisition and retention. This phenomenon can be explained with Information Processing Approach proposed by McLaughlin that the group which was required to retell the story devoted higher workload than those of the groups which were asked to answer questions or just watch the movie without any assignment, which helped them perform better in the test afterwards. Learners with large vocabulary size tended to gain more words after the experiment because they had better automaticity than those whose vocabulary size are relatively small.The present study is significant theoretically and pedagogically, which will give effective directions towards English teachers to use original movies with English subtitles to improve students'vocabulary acquisition. Because task demands and learner's individual factors will have remarkable influence on their words learning, teachers should carry out classroom activities by giving appropriate tasks while taking learners'factors into account.