Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Through Listening By First-year English Majors In China

In recent years, a large number of researchers have been devoting their attentionto the research on L2vocabulary acquisition. Most studies have been dedicated to therelationship between incidental vocabulary acquisition (hereafter IVA) and reading,and a large portion of these studies have verified the feasibility of IVA throughreading. However, only a small number of experiments have been conductedconcerning the relationship between IVA and listening.Findings suggest that vocabulary can be acquired through listening. Previousstudies of IVA through listening mainly focus on students of non-English majors.Only a few studies have taken English majors as their subjects. Moreover, most of theresearches on IVA through listening focus on the effectiveness of one behavior, that is,taking notes. No studies have been done to explore which behavior is more effectiveto IVA in listening. In the present study, an experiment based on the NoticingHypothesis was conducted to investigate the effects of note-taking and glosses on IVAthrough listening with the aim of exploring an effective way of acquiring vocabularyduring the listening process.61freshmen majoring in English from Ocean Universityof China participated in this study and they were divided into two groups: thenote-taking group and the gloss group. The two groups listened to the same passage.Before the experiment, the participants’ English scores in the college entranceexamination were collected and the Independent Samples T-test result showed thatthere was no significant difference between the two groups. During the experiment,the participants of the note-taking group were allowed to take notes only during thelistening process, while those of the gloss group could only refer to the vocabularygloss without taking notes. After listening to the passage, all the participants took animmediate vocabulary test, and three weeks later, a delayed vocabulary test was administered to all of them, which is the same as the immediate vocabulary test withthe order of the vocabulary moderately changed. All the participants did not knowthey would take these two vocabulary tests. The data of the two vocabulary tests werecollected and analyzed by SPSS16.0. The results show that (1) English majors canacquire second language vocabulary incidentally through listening and (2) the glossbehavior can better facilitate IVA during the listening process than the behavior oftaking notes.The present study has great significance in three aspects. Firstly, it has provedthe effectiveness of IVA through listening. Secondly, it has verified that gloss is moreeffective to IVA through listening than taking notes. Thirdly, these findings can helpChinese learners of English improve their listening ability and help Chinese teachersof English find an effective way to teach listening.