A Study On The Effects Of Different Tasks On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition In Five-year High Vocational English Listening Class

Vocabulary is the building material of a language, so vocabulary acquisition has been the hot issue in the field of the SL(second language) research. Since proposed in 1985, IVA(incidental vocabulary acquisition) has been aroused more and more attention, which means learners can acquire vocabulary incidentally when they are performing the learning tasks such as reading or listening to some English songs. It is generally acknowledged that most o f the SL vocabulary is acquired through IVA that is supposed to be a main learning mode of the SL learning. In the past decades, most of the researches have been conducted to examine the different factors that influence the IVA, such as word frequency, glosses etc. And the most influential one is the ILH(Involvement Load Hypothesis) proposed by B. Laufer and J.H. Hulstijn in 2001 to interpret the IVA from the learning tasks. The hypothesis claims the involvement of three factors, need, search and evaluation induced from the learning tasks depend on the IVA effect, that is, the more involvement of the learning task is, the better IVA effect will be. But most of these IVA studies focus on the reading context and a small number of experiments are conducted through listening. The subjects involved are mainly university students with a few high vocational college students concerned and five-year vocational college students are rarely chosen as subjects to study IVA.Mainly based on the ILH(Laufer & Hulstijn, 2001), the present study is attempted to investigate the effects of two listening tasks with different involvement loads on IVA for five-year vocational college students. The research questions are the following: 1) Can five-year vocational college students acquire vocabulary knowledge incidentally through Task LACR and Task LFCR in listening context? LACR is short for Listening – Answering the questions- Checking and listening in details- Reading after the speaker. LFCR is short for Listening – Filling in the blanks-Checking and listening in details- Retelling the passage. 2) If acquisition does occur, which task, Task LACR or Task LFCR, is more effective on IVA and words retention? 3) Which task, Task LACR or Task LFCR makes the five-year vocational college students with higher English proficiency more capable of IVA and words retention?In the present research, the subjects are 46 five-year vocational sophomores majored in Pharmacy and Testing from two intact classes in Xiang Tan Vocational Technical College, who are divided into one group with Task LACR and the other group with Task LFCR to perform. After listening to a short passage about shopping, both of the groups will complete their own learning tasks inducing different involvement loads. Group 1 with Task LACR will be asked to answer five questions which are irrelevant to the target words. Group 2 with Task LFCR will be required to fill in the blanks and retell the passage with all the target words. During the process the teacher will check the answers and help the students listen in details. Later acquisition and retention of the 8 target words will be measured by the immediate vocabulary test and one week later by the delayed vocabulary test. Later, a questionnaire is conducted on the participants’ attitudes and the learning habits of the listening tasks and IVA in listening class. The data collected are analyzed by the software SPSS.160. Results are as follows: 1) Five-year vocational college students can also acquire new words incidentally through different listening tasks. 2) The Group with Task LFCR performs significantly better than the Group with Task TACR in terms of IVA both in the immediate vocabulary test and in the delayed vocabulary test. 3) Task LFCR makes the students with higher English proficiency more capable of words acquisition and retention than Task LACR. The result of the questionnaire shows that the participants believe that vocabulary can be acquired during the listening process, and they prefer the tasks as listening and reading to output ones as retelling. Some suggestions are put forward such as vocabulary exercises are expected after listening.The present study draws the conclusion that the listening tasks with more involvement load are superior to those with less involvement load on the IVA and retention based on the results of the immediate and delayed tests after two listening tasks performed by the five-year vocational college students, which proves and enriches the ILH and enlarges the research subject as well. It also offers the practical implication that a more detailed method is presented for the English educators and learners in the five-year vocational college to learn vocabulary. To teachers, an effective listening task designed focused on new words is an ideal way to a combination of listening comprehension and IVA. To students, increasing the vocabulary can also depend on the listening practice with some tasks involved, besides the boring recitation of words list. In listening class, active involvement in the listening tasks can reach the sound effects of both acquiring vocabulary incidentally and improving the listening comprehension.