| Vocabulary has been widely acknowledged as a key component of language, but manyEFL learners find vocabulary learning boring and burdensome. Besides, instructors can notspend much of the limited time teaching new words and most of the teachers are morefocused on direct vocabulary teaching. Since “incidental vocabulary acquisition (IVA)”was first put forward by Nagy, Herman and Anderson in1985, studies of IVA in secondlanguage areas have received increasing attention at home and abroad. Incidentalvocabulary acquisition refers to the by-product of other activity, such as readingcomprehension, communication, even listening to music or watching movies without thelearner’s conscious intention to learn the words.An abundance of experimental research has verified the feasibility and effectivenessof incidental vocabulary acquisition through visual reading input, while little ink hasspilled over the research on incidental vocabulary acquisition in audio-visual context, thatis, acquire target words incidentally through watching authentic English movie. Thepresent study aims to find the answers to the following research questions:1. Can L2learners incidentally acquire vocabulary in video-watching class? If yes, towhat extent?2. Is there a relationship between L2learners’ cognitive styles and their performanceon incidental vocabulary acquisition? If yes, to what extent?3. Do watching tasks affect L2learners’ incidental vocabulary acquisition? If yes, towhat extent?Involved in the current study are168non-English majors who are from four naturalclasses majoring in different disciplines in Soochow University and their English teachers.They are all freshmen and are going to take College English Test Band4. The CognitiveStyle Figures Test and Vocabulary Size Test are administrated to measure participants’cognitive style and English proficiency level. All the participants are required to watch a15minutes’ movie-clip taken from a comedy named The Princess Diaries1twice withEnglish caption alone. Before watching the movie, the subjects receive different watchingtasks (“answer true or false questions” and “write a summary of the movie-clip”) and areinformed to finish the task after film-watching. The performance on incidental vocabulary acquisition is measured with immediate Vocabulary Knowledge Scale (VKS1) and delayedVocabulary Knowledge Scale (VKS2).For the data analysis, only76students’ data are adopted in order to answer theresearch questions and the students are divided into Group1and Group2. According to thescores of Cognitive Style Figures Test and Vocabulary Size Test, the two groups arecontrolled balanced in cognitive style and proficiency level. SPSS16.0is used to analyzethe raw data.The major findings of the research are as follows:(1) L2learners can incidentally acquire vocabulary through watching movies withEnglish caption. To be more specific, they can gain40%-46%of the target words inimmediate test while they can retain22%-35%of the target words in one week’s delayedtest.(2) There is positive correlation between participants’ cognitive style and theirperformance on incidental vocabulary acquisition. Moreover, FI learners acquired moretarget words in vocabulary test than FD learners.(3) L2learners with different watching tasks have different vocabulary acquisition.Generally speaking, students with the task requiring more workload get better results invocabulary acquisition and vocabulary retention than students with the task requiring lessworkload.In view of the above findings, the pedagogical implications can be offered as follows:(1) Teachers should make full use of multimedia computers to expose students to purenative English so as to facilitate incidental vocabulary acquisition. In addition, moreattention should be paid to the selection of the material.(2) Teachers should be aware of different cognitive styles and then guide students’learning in different ways. Field-dependent learners need extra help when learningvocabulary incidentally.(3) Teachers should adopt appropriate task in classroom activities so as to promoteincidental vocabulary acquisition as well as many other language skills. The task withhigher involvement load is more effective for incidental vocabulary acquisition. |
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