视听语境下任务投入量对英语专业学生词汇附带习得影响的研究

发布时间：2016-10-08 07:13

Chapter 1  Introduction 

Vocabulary learning is a basic part for  language learning especially for English learning. Learning English is like buildi ng a house, and vocabulary is the foundation for  the house. A  number  of bricks are  needed  for building a house. V ocabulary learning is just like the bricks and it has  the same function for English learning. Only when learners get enough vocabulary can th ey use the language fluently and express themselves properly. However,vocabulary learning is always  not so easy for Chinese learners. Learners try every method they can but only remember little words. Th at’s because learners always use traditional ways to recite words or expression s, and they just repeat to write or read the words again  and again and memorize them mechanically. This is not an efficient way for learners if they want to lear n better. Recently, more and more scholars and linguists have reali zed the significance of English vocabulary earning in a more efficient way and they believe that learning vocabulary incidentally in audio-visual context is one of them. According to the theory of Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition and Involvement Load  Hypothesis, m ore  and m ore  researchers  show great interest s  in the field of Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition both in  China and abroad. They have done m any experiments  about this m ethod  to resear chif  this m ethod  is high-ef ficient  to vocabulary  learning and how can it influe nce  vocabulary  learning  and also someimplicatesby experiment.

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Chapter 2Literature Review 

2.1  Vocabulary Learning

Vocabulary means all the words that a pe rson knows or uses, or all the words in a particular language. It also re fers to the words that people use when they are talking about a particular subject. Besides, it has  the meaning of a list  of words with their meanings,  especially in a book for learni ng  a foreign language. All of the above meanings of “vocabulary” are from “Oxford Advance Learner’s Dictionary” (2015, 9thEdition). Learning refers to gaining skills or kn owledge, often by studying or being taught by someone. The  term “vocabulary” is used in different places.It is not only used to represent the  total number of words  in  a language, but also can  represent  all the specific historical period of the word, such as  old English vocabulary, middle English and modern  English vocabulary .  People also  use  it to repr esent  all  specific  dialect vocabulary,  the words of a book, a kind of  academic  vocabulary and a person’ s vocabulary. And vocabulary learning can refer to the process of acquiring vocabulary according to the “Oxford Advance Learner’s Dictionary” (2015, 9th Edition). Englishis one of the world-wide used languages.Definitely its vocabulary is one of the largest and most abundant vocabularies. The general English vocabulary is estimated at more than 1 million today. Thus, learning enough English vocabulary is very necessary for English learners.

2.2  Theoretical Framework Associated with Incidental Vocabulary 

LearningSo-called “comprehensible input” means the understandable language material that learners can hear or read, a nd the difficulty of the material should be slightly higher than the learner current langua ge knowledge.The concept is similar to the “zone of proximal  development”  proposed by Sovi et  psychologist Lev V ygotsky  (1930). Vygotsky thought that teachers must notice that there are two development levels for children. One is the student’s existing level, it refers to children’s level to solve the problem in the independent activity; the other is the potential development level, that is also the potential acquired through the teaching.The difference between these two levels is “zone of proximal development”.Teachers should focus on students’ zone of proximal development, and provide students with a little difficultcontent to arouse the enthusiasm of students, and also exert students’ potential in order to beyond its recent developments and reach the next stage of  development level, and then ready for the next development.

Chapter 3  Methodology...................... 25

3.1Research Questions ................... 25
3.2Subjects ................ 26
3.3Instruments ................. 27
Chapter 4  Results and Discussion ............ 37
4.1Results ......... 37
4.2Discussion ........ 50
Chapter 5  Conclusion .......... 55
5.1  Major Findings ......... 56
5.2  Pedagogical Implication........ 57
5.3  Limitations of the Study ................. 58
5.4  Suggestions for Further Research ........ 58

Chapter 4Results  and Discussion 

4.1  Results

In order to supervise the experim ent process and investigate the research questions. The results of the pre-test we re analyzed by an independent sample t-test. Similarly, the results of the target words test, immediate-test and delayed-test on the 4th, 8th, 12thweek and also the result of post-test were listed and analyzed here separately. All the est results are collected and analyzed by SPSS 17.0. Following are the com parisons between those tests.    Table 4.1 shows that the mean score is 74.46 for Group A and 75.53 forgroup B. And in the second table of the independent sa mple t-test, it can be seen that F=0.015, sig. =0.902>0.005, it indicates that these two samples ha ve the same variance. Then t= -0.498  and Sig. (2-tailed)= 0.623>0.05 indi cates that there is no significant difference  between Group A and Group B,  and it proved the rational of group division.  Table 4.5 is the description of the mean scores in different tests on the 8th week. The standard deviation  of Group A  is a little bit higher than Group B in bot h immediate-test and delayed-test. The mean score in target word test for both Group A and Group B is just close to zero point. In the immediate-test, the mean score is 29.61 in Group A and 19.92 in Group B. In the de layed-test, the mean score is 24.69 in Group A and 14.84 in Group B. There was also  a great increase in vocabulary scores from target words test to immediate-test or to delayed-test in the 8th week. This result further  testified  that in cidental  vocabulary acquisition  did  occur in audio-visual context.

4.2  Discussion

According to table 4.2,it’s clear that after watching the  video material, students got much more scores in bo th immediate-test and delayed-test than in tar get word test. Table 4.5 and table 4.8 also show the same results. These results give an answer to the first research question—learners can acquire vocabularies incidentally in audio-visual context  in both groups. This result is  similar  to Rice & W oodsamll’s  (1998) experiment result. In their experim ent, they testified that children can acquire some words by watching cartoons. It’s also similar to Chen Huafeng & Peng Ranling’ s (1995) research result, who found that watc hing cartoons can help children acquiremore Chinesewords. The reasons are as followings. First,  the experim ental  result can  be  explained by Krashen’ s(1985)  input hypothesis.He thought that people get new wo rds through the com prehensibility of language input acquisition, not  by learning. And when the  input is “comprehensible input” and a little bit higher than learner’s current knowledge level, learners can learn more words. The video m aterial in this experiment is a kind of input for learners. It was chosen under strict criteria to ensure  the participants can understand 90% of the words in the video so it’ s comprehensible. The target words in this experiment were almost  totally new words for the subjects  and  the plot in  the  video  was close to subjects’ daily life, which fit the “i+1” principle. In addition, the subjects’ attention were on the plot and tasks, this was conf orm to input theory and m ade incidental vocabulary acquisition happened.  

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Chapter 5Conclusion

5.1  Major Findings

This  present study tends to investigat e  the ef fectiveness  of incidental vocabulary acquisition in audio-visual context and the effects of different involvement load  on incidental vocabular y  acquisition in audio-visu al  context. B ased  on the experiment, some major findings of this study are summarized below. First,students can acquire vocabulary incidentally in audio-visual context. It’s a different way to acquire new words com pared with traditional learning methods. It’s more interesting and can promote the efficiency of vocabulary learning. Besides, most of  the subjects get a progress in vocabul ary  size after a sem ester’s  study,  which illustrates this is an efficient way for learning vocabulary. Second,tasks with different involvement load have different effects on students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition in audio-visual context. Students with higher task involvement load learn better than student  with lower task involvem ent load, which testified  the Involvem ent  Load hypothesis.  In addition, students with higher tas k involvement load also retain better than lower ones. Third, the subjects become more interested in vocabulary learning with the help of  audio-visual con text.  It’s  different  with  traditional learning m ethods  because original English videos combine the text, sound and picture together, which makes the conversation alive and draws more attention from the subjects. The subjects learn not only the vocabulary but also its usage in certain content. 

5.2  Pedagogical Implication

According  to  the  experiment  results,  some  pedagogical im plications  are concluded in this part. First,  the present study proved that watching original English television series can  help learners acq uire  vocabulary  incidentally,  so there should be video appreciation course for English m ajor students if possible. And the video m aterial choice is also very important. Teachers should pick some educational materials and related  to students’  life, this can m ake  students interested in watching. The vocabularies in video should be proper to learners and make a good condition for incidental vocabulary acquisition. Second,  teachers should design different tasks to help students find the meaning of  new words. W ith  the help of  watching  tasks, students pay m ore  efforts  on understanding the meaning of new vocabul aries and can have a better knowledge bout  new words. W ordscan  be easy re membered  if their m eanings  are found by earners themselves, and it’sa better learning method than rote learning. Third, teachers should help students review new words in time. From the result in  Chapter  4, it’ s  easy  to f ind  that  there  is  a decr ease  from  immediate-test  to delayed-test. Thus, reviewing is very necessary in the process of learning. One of the most difficulties in vocabulary learning is forgetting. How many words can be learned in a certain period of time actually decide on how many times the word can appear in a certain period of time. So the more frequency a new word appears in the video, the easier for students to remember it. This point should be noticed by teachers.

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