A Study On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Of College Students In Multi-Media Context

This thesis studies incidental vocabulary acquisition (IVA) of college students and factors that influence IVA in multi-media context (i.e. authentic English movie clips watching condition here) so as to improve college English vocabulary teaching. Five questions are put forward as follows:1) Can Chinese EFL college students acquire vocabulary incidentally when watching authentic English movie clips? If can, how does it happen? 2) Does students’ reading proficiency influence IVA? How and to what extent does reading proficiency influence IVA? 3) Does students’ listening proficiency influence IVA? How and to what extent does listening proficiency influence IVA? 4) Do different learning tasks affect IVA? Are there some criteria to observe and measure the effectiveness of tasks? 5) Does different topic familiarity of movie clips affect IVA? How does it affect IVA?According to scores of reading and listening comprehension parts of CET-4, the author selects 60 sophomores majoring science of law and grades them into learners with high reading proficiency and high listening proficiency (RHLH); learners with high reading proficiency and low listening proficiency (RHLL); and learners with low reading proficiency and high listening proficiency (RLLH). Besides, the author selects two movie clips "Pride and Prejudice" and "Mr. Fantastic Fox", designs two different learning tasks and uses SPSS 17.0 to conduct paired t-tests on the data. Based on the "Involvement Load Hypothesis" put forward by Laufer and Hulstijn (2001) and some relevant concepts, such as Noticing Hypothesis, Depth of Processing Hypothesis, conclusions are drawn as follows:1) EFL students’IVA can occur during the movie clips watching, owing to the rich context they provide. Under that condition, students are more cognitively engaged, leading to vocabulary growth.2) Students’listening proficiency does not play the same important part as reading proficiency in IVA. This may be related to the traditional way of teaching which trains students in reading and offers little chance to experience video watching.3) Learners mainly use linguistic and extra-linguistic clues to guess or infer meaning of words. Those higher in reading or listening proficiency have higher capacity to take advantage of all the information in multi-media context to establish form-meaning connection of words while their counterpart remain less sensitive to words and have lower capacity to process the information/input.4) Different tasks have impact on IVA. Involvement Load Hypothesis can be regarded as a criterion to manipulate and measure the effectiveness of tasks. Tasks with higher involvement load lead to better IVA.5) Topic familiarity of videos influences IVA. When the topic matches the learners’schema, more attention and motivation are paid to infer the meaning of words.