The Effects Of English Video Watching On Senior High School Students’ Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

Vocabulary constitutes the major part of language learning, but to many English learners, vocabulary learning is boring, burdensome and easy to forget. No doubt vocabulary becomes the most difficult part of English learning. Researchers have paid much more attention to vocabulary acquisition and tried to study on it from different angles. In 1985, Nagy, Herman and Anderson first put forward the notion “incidental vocabulary acquisition”. From then on, studies of incidental vocabulary acquisition in second language areas have attracted increasing attention.By now, there have been abundant studies on incidental vocabulary acquisition at home and abroad. Most of them focus on whether reading can promote incidental vocabulary acquisition, while little attention has been paid to the research on incidental vocabulary acquisition in audio-visual context. China has a large number of English learners, and most research took English majors or non-English majors in universities as the research subject; on the other hand, research on senior high school students is little. The present study aims to explore the effects of English videos on senior high school students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition and tries to answer the following questions:1.What effects does English video watching have on senior high school students’ word-form and word-meaning acquisition?2.What different effects do different video watching tasks have on senior high school students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition?3.What are senior high school students’ attitudes towards vocabulary acquisition through English videos watching?The research subjects are from two different normal classes of Grade 1, in Hanshou No. 1 Middle School, Changde. During the research, students of the two classes watched the video with bilingual subtitles-High School Musical, and they were told to finish the relevant tasks after the video watching. Students from class 1 watched the video and underlined the unfamiliar words while students from class 2 watched the video and finished the different watching tasks by groups. Group 1 finished the summary-writing task and Group 2 finished the True or False question, but Group 3 had no task at all. Having finished the tasks, all the participants of the three groups were demanded to finish the immediate test in 15 minutes, which includes word-form recognition and word-meaning recognition. After the test, the reading passages were delivered to each participant as an interference test. A week later, a delayed test would be conducted but no more video watching this time. The contents were the same but in disrupted order. After the delayed test, a questionnaire survey was followed.After the research, SPSS 21.0 has been used to analyze the raw data, and the major findings can be concluded as follows:1. Students can achieve word-form and word-meaning acquisition through English video watching. Both for word-form recognition and word-meaning recognition in the immediate test and the delayed test, students all get satisfactory scores. By comparing the scores of the immediate test and the delayed test, we can easily find that students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition is likely forgotten as time goes by.2. Different watching tasks can affect students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition, and there is a positive correlation between task involvement loads and students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition. The higher the workload is, and the better performance showed in both the immediate test and the delayed test.3. Senior high school students hold positive attitudes towards vocabulary acquisition through English video watching. Besides, they agree to take some watching tasks after videos watching. Different individuals have different watching habits. But for senior high school students from Hanshou No.1 middles school, they do not watch English video frequently, and they prefer films of life with bilingual subtitles.The findings of the present study can supply some inspiration for both theoretical study and practical teaching. Theoretically, it will testify the Input Hypothesis, the Depth of Processing theory and the Involvement Load Hypothesis, and at the same time, it will provide a novel angle of view for incidental vocabulary acquisition study at home. Practically, it will supply some suggestions for English teachers on how to teach vocabulary effectively and some help for senior high school students on how to acquire vocabulary effectively.