A Comparative Study Of L2 Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition — Listening V.s. Reading

In recent years, growing attention has been devoted to the issue of L2 vocabulary acquisition, it is, however, still not so clear as to how learners acquire vocabulary or how it can be best taught. An abundance of experimental research has verified the feasibility and effectiveness of incidental vocabulary acquisition through visual reading input, while little ink has spilled over the research on incidental vocabulary acquisition (IVA) through auditory or listening input.Some researchers indicated that through manipulation of task-based factors, vocabulary retention performance could be enhanced. Learners involved in productive word-focused tasks were more likely to recall words than those engaged in receptive tasks. Among different productive tasks that enhance incidental vocabulary acquisition, composition and interaction tasks become the focus, however, few studies have compared the effects these two tasks have on facilitating L2 IVA. Thus the need of making such a comparison and investigating the underlying reasons comes into being. Studies towards Schmit's noticing hypothesis shed light on this issue: tasks in which the role of attention can be better exerted induce better language acquisition performance. It has been verified that output promotes noticing (Swain, 1995); According to Long (1996), interaction"facilitates acquisition because it connects input, internal learner capacities, particularly selective attention, and output in productive ways". With interaction research extending into cognitive field, researchers found out that interactional feedback helped learners to notice the gap between interlanguage and target language and observe the subsequent input. Learners who received interaction task could get teacher's feedback while those who received composition task could not. Would interactional feedback help interaction task better exert learners'attention and thus better facilitate second language vocabulary acquisition (SLVA)? Based on the noticing hypothesis, output hypothesis as well as interaction hypothesis, the present study is set to investigate which task (interaction or composition) has better effects on incidental English vocabulary acquisition under different stimulus input modes, namely, auditory mode and visual mode. The author conducted her experiment on non-English-major EFL Chinese college students of first grade in Shandong Liaocheng University and hypothesized that interaction task would achieve better SLVA effects, considering it might exert higher quality attention of learners. The simple test of supplying the target words with Chinese equivalents was implemented to measure SLVA effects both in immediate test and in delayed test.The present study found that interaction achieved better effects on SLVA than composition either under the reading input mode or under listening input mode, which proved that interaction task could prompt higher quality attention and that such high quality attention could triger further deep processing which is essential for L2 vocabulary to take place. Another important finding is that as task being the same, L2 vocabulary acquisition effect is a little better under listening input mode than under reading input mode. This unexpected result can be explained in terms of attention students pay to vocabulary when receiving input and different input mode of vocabulary. This finding also enlightens L2 teaching in that phonology is an important factor affecting L2 vocabulary acqusition and we cannot ignore IVA with listening input.