A Preliminary Study On Chinese Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition In Listening Comprehension

Researches show that reading and listening are key approaches to L2incidentalvocabulary acquisition. Much attention has been focused on incidental vocabularyacquisition of English in reading comprehension. Incidental vocabulary acquisition inlistening lacks empirical evidence. The study aims to investigate how tasks of differentinvolvement load and language proficiency influence learners of Chinese as a foreignlanguage’s incidental vocabulary acquisition in listening comprehension.The Involvement Load Hypothesis, put forward by Laufer and Hulstijn in2001,consisted of Need, Search and Evaluation, is characterized by making the depth ofprocessing quantified through constructing various task-induced involvement loads. Thehypothesis holds that the higher involvement the tasks induce, the better the acquisitionwill be.Based on above assumptions, two tasks (listening comprehension+gap-fill,listening comprehension+retell) were designed to compare the effect of differenttask-induced involvement loads on incidental learning by the learners of Chinese at twolanguage proficiency levels. Besides, the research aimed to examine how languageproficiency influences incidental vocabulary acquisition when the involvement load wasthe same.The researcher predicted that higher task-induced involvement load would belikely to lead to better performance in immediate and delayed tests then the lower onewhen learners were at the same language proficiency; the higher language proficiencywould lead to better word acquisition when task-induced involvement load was thesame.Through two-way repeated measure ANOVA analysis, the results showed that, allparticipants were able to acquire new words through listening. The results also showedthat for high level learners, tasks with higher involvement load resulted in betterperformance in both the immediate and the delayed test than tasks with lowinvolvement load; but for low level learners, tasks with higher involvement load did notlead to a significant difference in immediate test compared to low involvement load butbetter retention in delayed test. Thus to some extent, tasks with higher involvement loadfacilitate incidental acquisition.Based on the results obtained in the study, the task effectiveness and insights to Chinese listening teaching and textbook compilation were also discussed.