A Study Of The Effects Of Working Memory On Listening Comprehension And Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

Listening is a critical and important element of the four main language skills in English. In recent years, more and more scholars pay their attention to the study of listening comprehension. Under the background of Incidental Vocabulary Theory, a large part of researches have been done to study the relationship between the listening comprehension and incidental vocabulary acquisition. Scholars do find that one can acquire some vocabulary knowledge through listening comprehension. Yet most study about the incidental vocabulary acquisition in listening comprehension has been done at the superficial level due to the unobservability of cognitive process in listening comprehension. Since listening comprehension is a cognitive activity, it is necessary to take the cognitive factors into account to further study the incidental vocabulary acquisition in listening comprehension. One of the major cognitive factors of listening comprehension is the working memory span.Working memory is the workshop of information processing, in which the information is processed for storage. During the process of listening comprehension, new information is processed and stored. There were many researches indicated that working memory is one of the main cognitive factors which determine the individual difference in listening comprehension. Thus this study investigates the effects of working memory on the listening comprehension and incidental vocabulary acquisition. It combines these three elements and aims to explore the effect of working memory on incidental vocabulary acquisition through listening comprehension. The subjects of this paper were fifty English-major sophomores come from the School of Foreign Language of Yangzhou University. The author designed three tests for them to explore the effect of working memory on the incidental vocabulary acquisition through listening comprehension. The first test is working memory span test in which the subjects were required to judge the meaningfulness of each sentence and meanwhile the final word of each sentence. After the working memory span test, they were divided into high and low working memory span groups. The second test is listening comprehension test in which the subjects were required to do some multiple choice questions after listening to some passages. This test is done to explore the effects of working memory on listening comprehension. The assumption of this test is that different working memory span can influence the proficiency of listening comprehension. The final test is incidental vocabulary acquisition test in which the subjects were required to do some translation of the target words. Those target words are chosen from the listening materials. This research is done to explore the effects of working memory on incidental vocabulary acquisition through listening comprehension. The assumption of this test is that different working memory span will influence the incidental vocabulary acquisition level through listening comprehension.The results of this study are as follows:(1) High working memory group get better results in listening comprehension test which suggests that working memory span does affect listening comprehension proficiency. Subjects in high working memory group were supposed to be better listeners than the subjects in low working memory group. This finding proves that working memory span is an important cognitive factor that influences the listening comprehension proficiency.(2) English majors can acquire vocabulary incidentally through listening comprehension. This finding proves the effectiveness of incidental vocabulary acquisition through listening comprehension. This result can also improve the validity of the Incidental Vocabulary Theory.(3) High working memory group get better results in translation test, suggesting that working memory span does affect incidental vocabulary acquisition through listening comprehension. There is a positive relationship between working memory and the incidental vocabulary acquisition through listening comprehension.According to the above results of this study, some pedagogical implications are presented in order to provide some suggestions to help second language learners improve their listening proficiency. The pedagogical implications of this thesis will help the second language learners to compensate their individual working memory limitation and hence improve their English proficiency. Moreover, the present study will give some useful suggestions for English teachers to find effective ways to teach listening.