Research On The Incidental Acquisition Of Collocation Through Reading While Listening

Vocabulary learning is an important part of language learning,and its importance has long been valued by language researchers.Collocation is closely related to vocabulary learning and has gradually become the one of the focus points of contemporary linguistic research.The researches for incidental vocabulary acquisition have been carrying out since the 1990 s and the linguistics researchers have obtained certain achievement.As for the incidental acquisition of collocation,researchers at home and abroad focus on it from the angle of different single input modes such as reading or listening,while there are few researches on the incidental acquisition of collocation through reading while listening at the same time.Based on Input Hypothesis,Theory of Depth of Processing and Involvement Load Hypothesis,the present study aims to address the following three questions:1.Can collocations be acquired incidentally through reading while listening?2.How many encounters with collocations are needed to incidentally acquire the receptive and productive knowledge of form and meaning of the collocations when reading while listening?3.How is the retention of immediate post-test and delayed post-test in the incidental acquisition of receptive and productive knowledge of form and meaning acquisition of the collocations when reading while listening?The participants include 100 non-English major's sophomore students from five parallel classes in Bohai University.Participants are assigned to one control group and four experimental groups.The four experimental groups read and listen to graded materials containing 18 target collocations different times respectively.The control group read and listen to graded materials without any target collocation.Immediate post-test is conducted immediately after treatment,and delayed post-test is conducted one week later.All the data are collected and analyzed by SPSS.The main findings of this study are as follows.Firstly,collocations can be acquired incidentally through reading while listening.Secondly,10 times and above encounters with collocations are needed to incidentally acquire the receptive and productive knowledge of form and meaning when reading while listening.Finally,in terms of incidental acquisition of receptive knowledge of form and meaning,10 and15 times remained stable;in terms of productive knowledge of form and meaning,10 times of encounter is poor,but 15 times of encounter is stable.Moreover,this research supplies useful reference for future research in this field.