An Empirical Study Of Incidental Acquisition Of Receptive And Productive Vocabulary In Different Listening Tasks

How to promote students' vocabulary acquisition has been a major concern of second language acquisition (SLA) research. A large number of empirical studies show that learners can acquire vocabulary incidentally in the process of reading, but few studies focus on whether learners can acquire vocabulary incidentally in the listening process. Furthermore, the types of vocabulary knowledge are relatively narrow among these studies, for most studies pay more attention to the incidental acquisition of receptive vocabulary rather than that of productive vocabulary. Hence, the present study attempts to explore learners' incidental vocabulary acquisition in English listening training, and compare the influences of tasks with different involvement load on incidental vocabulary acquisition effect, including receptive vocabulary knowledge and productive vocabulary knowledge, instant vocabulary acquisition and delayed vocabulary retention. And then on the basis of this, some suggestions or ideas for listening training, vocabulary teaching and learning are put forward.Based on involvement load hypothesis (ILH) and incidental vocabulary acquisition (IVA) theory, the present study uses listening comprehension training and vocabulary tests to investigate the incidental acquisition effect of receptive and productive vocabulary in the listening process. The subjects of this study are 9th-graders of No.27 middle school in Handan, who are from four randomly selected parallel classes. The number of students is 184, among them,117 students are the effective experiment subjects. Research instruments contain listening tests, vocabulary tests, questionnaire and interview. Especially, the implementation of vocabulary tests are divided into three times respectively, namely vocabulary level test before the experiment, instant vocabulary acquisition test and delayed vocabulary retention test during the experiment. According to the scoring criteria, calculate scores of the vocabulary tests, and then process and analyze data by SPSS19.0 software.In accordance with data analysis and discussion, the results show that:Firstly, students of junior middle school can acquire receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge incidentally in the listening process. Furthermore, the instant acquisition and delayed retention effects of receptive vocabulary are better than that of productive vocabulary.Secondly, the involvement load size and incidental vocabulary acquisition are in positive correlation in the listening process, namely task with large involvement load brings about great incidental vocabulary acquisition in the listening training. In other words, ILH is valid and feasible in listening process.Thirdly, the vocabulary acquisition effect of gap-filling group and composition-writing group is much better than that of multi-choice group, but there exists no significant difference between the vocabulary acquisition effect of gap-filling group and that of composition-writing group.All in all, this study proves the validity and feasibility of IVA and ILH in the listening process. Moreover, the questionnaire indicates that students perceive positive attitude to IVA in listening process, so teachers should activate students' potentials of IVA in listening training. Therefore, based on the results of this study, the following instruction advice is brought about:Firstly, set appropriate and effective target word learning tasks in the listening training in accordance with the target word's characteristics.Secondly, make comprehensive learning task arrangements and make students review vocabulary timely.Thirdly, advocate the combination of listening and writing, or that of listening and other language skills.Finally, encourage the combination of intentional vocabulary learning and incidental vocabulary acquiring.