An Empirical Study Of The Effect Of DIL On English IVA In Audio-visual Context

We all know that vocabulary is the basic unit of sentences. It plays a core part inlearning a language. Therefore, having and masteirng a large number of vocabulary is ofbenefit to foreign learners. However, it is a fact that vocabulary teaching in China is always atan inefficient stage, setting up an upsurge of the study on vocabulary acquisition. What’s more，in recent years, with the popularity of incidental vocabulary acquisition, a growing number ofresearchers have turned their eyes on it.In literature, scholars pirmarily conduct researches on of incidental vocabularyacquisition under reading context. Studies under audio-visual context are rare and still at adeveloping stage. Nowadays, with the rapid development of Internet as well as multimedia,English oirginal films are widely used in English teaching. Whether Chinese non-Englishmajors can acquire vocabulary incidentally or not when watching a iflm is one of the mainpurposes of this study. Besides，the second aim of this research is to examine if students’present vocabulary size can influence incidental vocabulary acquisition and retention whilethey watch a iflm. Lastly, according to the prior researches, the different reading tasks cangreatly affect incidental vocabulary acquisition, so the last aim of this study is to ifnd outwhether different watching tasks can affect incidental vocabulary acquisition and retention orThe subjects participating in this research are80non-English major rfeshmen. Theyare from two parallel groups and each group has different vocabulary size. The two groupsreceive two different watching tasks respectively, in other words, the involvement load in Group B is more than that in Group A. After the film and the watching tasks are finished,subjects receive an immediate post-test and a delayed post-test one week later, and SPSS isused to analyze the collected data. According to the analyses and discussions, threeconclusions can be made：Firstly, incidental vocabulary acquisition can indeed happen when subjects watch a filmwith Chinese-English subtitles.In addition, the larger the vocabulary size is, the more vocabulary can be acquired, butthe worse the performance in retention is.Lastly, the watching task with more involvement load can cause better vocabularyacquisition. However, similarly, the performance in retention is not as good as expected.The results of the study not only show some theoretical significance and pedagogicalimplication for teaching and learning vocabulary, but also point out some limitations.