Effects Of Text-Retelling On Students' Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

Many language learners and language teachers hold the view that vocabulary plays the pivotal role in language learning and the key to our successful communication.Sometimes,the non-native grammatical structures will hinder communication due to the “sounds unnatural” utterances,but no-native word can result in complete communication failure,leading to essential information lost or misunderstandings.For instance,a English learner says a sentence which not conforms to grammatical rules.Despite the fact that the sentence may be unnatural or incorrect to a great extent,the expected information can still be understood by the listener.However,with the wrong word,the listener can hardly understand what it means,which leads to communication failure.It requires additional explanation if the intended meaning can be understood accurately,even though the sentence is perfectly grammatical.Given this pivotal state in language learning,this study introduces retelling into high school English vocabulary teaching.By analyzing the impact of retelling task on second language vocabulary learning,this study aims at finding out whether retelling can improve second language vocabulary learning for high school students and tries to answer the following questions:(1)Can text-retelling help to improve students' incidental vocabulary acquisition? If it can,what effects does text-retelling training have on the form,meaning and usage of vocabulary acquisition respectively?(2)Does text-retelling have good impact on vocabulary retention from three perspectives,the form,meaning and usage?An empirical study is conducted.A total of 50 freshmen in senior high school are selected from a high school in Nanchang took part in this study and they are randomly divided into two groups: the control group and the retelling group.Both groups are given the same passage,but the task is different.In the control group,they are required to remember the words behind the passage,which is the traditional method of vocabulary acquisition.The other group should retell the passage,which acquires vocabulary incidentally as they are not told to remember these words directly.After the tasks,all students unexpectedly have the vocabulary tests(including a fill-in test and a vocabulary knowledge scale test)to measure their lexical acquisition through the task.A week later,there is a delayed vocabulary test with the same testing contents only changing the sequences in order to find out the effects of the tasks on word retention.The vocabulary test scores are studied with the statistics.Firstly,the results indicate that both groups enable to acquire the word knowledge.In the immediate post-test,the accuracy of both groups is more than 50%,and the retelling group is as high as 79%.Even though there is a decrease in the delayed post-test,the retelling group can still exceed 60%.It can have incidental vocabulary acquisition by retelling the text.Secondly,in the form test,both methods have similar effects.There is no significant difference between the two groups.In the meaning test,the retelling group gain significantly higher score,especially for the word “heacher” and “derise”.And in the usage test,the retelling group also has better performance both in the immediate post-test and delayed post-test,the mean score of them is 3.36 and 3.46 respectively,which is obviously higher than the control group.At last,by comparing the immediate and delayed post-test scores of the retelling group,it can conclude that the retention only has effectiveness on word usage,which means students can use these words in post-delayed test successfully comparing with immediate-delayed test.In the perspectives of form and meaning,the retention effects are not ideal,which means students are easily to forget the form and meaning of the word.