A Comparative Study Of Effects Of Composition And Interaction Tasks On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Of Non-english Majors

The past three decades have witnessed an expansion of research scope of secondlanguage vocabulary acquisition, with some scholars considering it a central task of secondlanguage acquisition. Most studies have been dedicated to the relationship between incidentalvocabulary acquisition (IVA) and reading, and a large portion of these studies have verified thefeasibility of IVA through reading. However, only a small number of experiments have beenconducted concerning the relationship between IVA and listening. Some researchers indicatedthat through manipulation of task-based factors, vocabulary retention performance could beenhanced. Learners involved in productive word-focused tasks were more likely to recall wordsthan those engaged in receptive tasks. Among different productive tasks that enhance IVA,composition and interaction tasks become the focus; however, few studies have compared theeffects these two tasks have on facilitating foreign language IVA. According to Long,interaction “facilitates acquisition because it connects input, internal learner capacities,particularly selective attention, and output in productive ways”. With interaction researchextending into cognitive field, researchers found out that negative feedback helped learners tonotice the gap between their interlanguage and target language and observe the subsequentinput. Learners who received interaction task could get the teacher’s negative feedback whilethose who received composition task could not. Would negative feedback help interaction taskexert better learners’ attention and thus better facilitate foreign language vocabulary acquisition?Based on the noticing hypothesis and interaction hypothesis, the present study is to investigatewhich task (interaction or composition) has better effects on incidental English vocabularyacquisition under the listening input.In the present study,60non-English-major freshmen from Linyi Universityparticipated and they were divided into two groups: the listening-interaction group (L-I group)and the listening-composition group (L-C group). The two groups listened to the same passage.Before the experiment, the participants’ English scores in the English placement test forfreshmen were collected and the Independent Samples T-test result showed that there was nosignificant difference between the two groups in English proficiency. During the experiment, the participants of the L-I group were allowed to interact within group members and then with ateacher respectively after the listening process, while those of the L-C group finished a shortwriting according to what they had just heard. After finishing the interaction or compositiontask, all the participants took an immediate vocabulary test. Two weeks later, a delayedvocabulary test was administered to all of them, which is similar as the immediate vocabularytest with the order of the vocabulary moderately changed. The simple test of supplying thetarget words with Chinese equivalents was implemented to measure the foreign languagevocabulary acquisition effects both in immediate test and in delayed test. All the participants didnot know they would take these two vocabulary tests. The data of the two vocabulary tests werecollected and analyzed by SPSS16.0. A group interview followed the delayed test to verify thefunction of noticing on IVA. The results of tests and the interview show that non-Englishmajors can acquire English vocabulary incidentally through interaction and composition taskunder the listening input, and interaction achieved better effects on incidental vocabularyacquisition than composition under the listening input, which proved that interaction task couldprompt higher quality attention and that such high quality attention could trigger further deepprocessing, which is essential for foreign language vocabulary acquisition to take place.The present study has great significance in two aspects. Firstly, it has proved theeffectiveness of incidental vocabulary acquisition through interaction and composition tasksunder the listening input mode. Secondly, Chinese teachers of English should lay enoughemphasis on dynamic interaction and feedback, with rich contexts, to promote and consolidatethe internalization of words acquired incidentally.