| Vocabulary is the basic unit of language. No one can remember all the Englishwords; even native speakers can not achieve that goal. In our country, universitystudents take vocabulary learning as a crucial and difficult part. They are not Englishmajor students; So Few of them have enough time to contact with English in theirdaily life. However, new word requires students to memory many times repeatedly.Students often complaint about that vocabulary learning is difficult and to retainedvocabulary for a long time even harder.Vocabulary plays an important role in English learning, so it attracts attention ofmany scholars and leads to people constantly carry on research and exploration. In the1980s, the rise of communicative teaching method prompted vocabulary learningpays more attention to the function of incidental vocabulary acquisition. Theterminology “incidental vocabulary acquisition” was first proposed by Nagy, Hermanand Anderson in their research on children’s first language vocabulary acquisition(cited in Zhu,2004). It is generally recognized that incidental vocabulary acquisitionis relative to “intentional language learning”, it is a type of learning that takevocabulary as a by-product during other language activity, such as listening to music,reading and watching movie. In recent years, scholars laid the related studies onreading, and with the flourish development of the movie business, the original filmmaterials get more and more widely applied in foreign language teaching. More andmore scholars tried to introduce the film into the classroom teaching.In this thesis, the author takes the incidental vocabulary acquisition which proposedby Nagy, Herman and Anderson as theoretical foundation, according to According tonon-English major students’ present situation, the author studies and analyzes theeffect of incidental vocabulary acquisition by watching movie on student’s vocabularylearning. The researcher tries to answer following three questions:(1) Can Chineseuniversity student acquire vocabulary incidentally when they are watching Englishmovies?(2) If they can, is it retained for a longer period in student’s memory (over the everlasting of one week)?(3) Does the factor of different watching purpose affectstudent’s incidental vocabulary acquisition?The chapter one gives us an introduction. It simply introduces background of thestudy, the significance of the study and organization of the thesis. The second chapteris a literature review, it including related theory and research condition both at homeand abroad. The third chapter is research design. The author chose270students inChangchun normal university as research subjects and designed pretest, posttest anddelayed test to inspect students’ receptive vocabulary knowledge. Group A，B and Cwas assigned three different tasks in post test, The students in group A (30participantchosen from accounting major) was required to answer questions which related tomovie content. The students in group B (30participant chosen from computer scienceand technology major) was required to repeated the main plot in the movie segment.The students in group C (30participant chosen from history major) without any tasksexcept for watching designated movie segments in this process, The fourth chapterobtained results by analyzing related data. The fifth chapter is the discussion of theresults and the last chapter is a conclusion.This study broaden the theory of incidental vocabulary acquisition bycombining the theory and practice to verify whether students can acquired vocabularyknowledge through watching movie and can these words retained more than one week.At the same time, different watching purposes can also lead to different effect ofvocabulary acquisition. The author hopes that teachers and students can understandand use this theory effectively in practical teaching. Due to the complexity of thesubject, the limited ability and knowledge level of the author, this paper also existsome limitations. The author hopes that the further study can be conducted in bettercondition. |
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