论文总字数：44126字

摘 要

1 INTRODUCTION 1

1.1 Need for the study 1

1.2 Research purposes 2

2 LITERATURE REVIEW 3

2.1 Incidental L2 vocabulary acquisition 3

2.2 The involvement load hypothesis and incidental L2 vocabulary acquisition 4

2.3 Empirical studies on incidental L2 vocabulary acquisition through reading 5

2.4 Problems in the previous studies 7

3 METHODOLOGY 9

3.1 Research questions 9

3.2 Listening material and tasks 9

3.3 Procedure of data collection 10

3.4 Scoring methods 11

3.5 Data analysis 11

4 RESULTS and DISCUSSIONS 13

4.1 Results 13

4.1.1 Descriptive statistics for L2 receptive and productive vocabulary acquisition 13

4.1.2 Tests of group differences in L2 receptive and productive vocabulary acquisition 14

4.2 Discussions 14

5 CONCLUSIONS 17

5.1 Major findings of the study 17

5.2 Implications 17

5.2.1 Theoretical implications 17

5.2.2 Pedagogical implications 18

5.3 Limitations and suggestions for future research 18

REFERENCES 20

Acknowledgements

It is one of the real challenges that I have ever met in my life to finish this paper. This paper is an outcome of support, encouragement and love that I received from a great many people. I would like to take this opportunity to express my sincere thanks to those who have contributed to the completion of this paper.

First of all, my greatest thankfulness is to my supervisor, Professor Bao Gui, for his painstaking effort in guiding me through the whole stage of writing this paper. During my preparation for this paper, Professor Bao helped me in choosing the topic, collecting samples, and accessing the software for treating the data. His profound knowledge and insights broadened my horizon in linguistic studies. It would be impossible for me to finish this job without his patient guidance, continuous encouragement and generous support. What’s more, it is my great honor to benefit from his personalities and diligence, and I believe that will be helpful through my life.

I would like to thank all the other teachers who have imparted to me so much valuable knowledge and provided me with guidance, assistance and concern throughout my four-years’ study and daily life at the university.

In addition, special thanks go to my dear friends and fellow students, who have accompanied me throughout the four years at the university. They shared happiness and sadness with me and taught me a lot. I always consider our friendship an invaluable treasure and a constant driving force to me.

Last but not least, I would like to extend my grateful thanks to and deepest respect for my parents, who have always been encouraging me to finish this paper. It is their constant encouragement that gave me spiritual support to overcome all the difficulties I encountered in the paper writing and other aspects of my life.

Abstract

This study investigates how different listening tasks affect EFL learners’ vocabulary acquisition. To be specific, it addresses the following two questions:

1. Is there any significant difference between the gap-filling task and the multiple-choice task in contributing to EFL learners’ receptive vocabulary knowledge of the target words?
2. Is there any significant difference between the gap-filling task and the multiple-choice task in contributing to EFL learners’ productive vocabulary knowledge of the target words?

The experiment was administered to 50 sophomores of English learners, coming from two intact classes in Nanjing Tech University. The listening-related tasks and L2 incidental vocabulary acquisition test were administered to those students. One listening task was the gap-filling task, where participants were asked to write the target words in the blanks after they listened to each of three passages. The other task was the multiple-choice task, where participants were asked to answer a number of listening comprehension questions related to the target words after they listened to each of three passages. Since the time on task is considered an inherent property of a task, the participants who received the same level of input frequency were asked to finish the different listening tasks at the same time. All the participants were assigned to one task at random. After 10 minutes break, all the participants were given an immediate L2 incidental vocabulary acquisition test

From the analyses of the data, the following conclusions have been reached. Firstly, there is a significant difference between the multiple-choice and the gap-filling tasks in contributing to EFL learners’ receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge of the target words. In other words, the gap-filling task group performs better than the multiple-choice task in contributing to both receptive and productive vocabulary acquisition of EFL learners.

Independent sample t tests showed that the gap-filling task performs significantly better than the multiple-choice task in contributing to both receptive and productive vocabulary acquisition. Therefore, it is suggested that gap-filling exercises should be given more frequently in teaching EFL listening vocabulary so that EFL teachers can make good use of listening activities to improve EFL learner’s vocabulary knowledge.

Key words: task type; L2 vocabulary acquisition; the input-output hypotheses; the involvement ; multiple-choice; gap-filling

中文摘要

本文旨在研究的听力任务是如何影响英语学习者的词汇习得的。具体而言，它将解决以下两个问题：

1.在促进目标词的英语学习者的接受性词汇知识学习中，填空任务与多项选择任务之间是否存在显著差异？

2.在促进目标词的英语学习者的产出性词汇知识学习中，填空任务与多项选择任务之间是否存在显著差异？

实验对象是来自南京工业大学两个自然班二年级的50名英语学习者。给这些学生做听力相关任务和二语词汇附带习得测试。一个听力任务是填空—参与者在分别听完三个段落后在空格上填上目标词。另一个听力任务则是多项选择—要求参与者在分别听完三个段落后完成于目标词相关的听力理解问题。由于任务时间被认为是一个任务的固有属性，参与者在输入频率相同的情况下在同一时间完成不同的听力任务。所有参与者随机完成其中一个听力任务。任务结束后休息十分钟。然后所有的参与者将进行一个即时的二语词汇附带习得测试。

从数据分析可以得出以下结论。首先，多项选择与填空任务在促进英语学习者接受性和产出性目标词汇知识的习得上存在显著差异；并且在促进英语学习者接受性和产出性目标词汇知识的习得上, 填空任务优于多项选择。

独立样本t检验表明，填空任务在促进接受性和产出性词汇习得上均显著优于选择题任务。因此，建议外语听力词汇教学中应更频繁地运用填空任务进行练习，以便教师们充分利用好听力练习来扩大外语学习者的词汇量。

关键词：任务类型 二语词汇习得 输入输出假设 投入量 多项选择 填空

• • • 1. INTRODUCTION

As we all know, during the whole process of foreign language learning, vocabulary learning plays an extremely significant role. It is one of the essential components of a language in the unity of meaning and structure in the language system. One of the main difficulties for those EFL learners who want to achieve effective communication is that they need to acquire an amount of words. Vocabulary size directly influences L2 learners’ mastery and application of the four basic English skills—listening, speaking, reading and writing. So far much research has been done on incidental L2 vocabulary acquisition in the field of reading (Gai, 2003; Huang, 2004; Hulstijin amp; Laufer, 2001). But little has been done on the effect of task type on EFL learners’ individual word acquisition. This study is aimed to apply the involvement load hypothesis to investigate the effects of two task types (multiple-choice and gap-filling) on EFL learners’ incidental individual word acquisition in listening.

1.1 Need for the study

Pedagogically, vocabulary is the base of all languages, which is used to make up large structures like sentences, paragraphs and even whole passages. The acquisition and retention of individual words have become one of the critical issues in second language learning and teaching. Because L2 vocabulary is critical important to L2 learners and teachers, facilitating learning and teaching L2 vocabulary requires studies concerning how various factors affect L2 vocabulary acquisition.

Theoretically, incidental vocabulary acquisition has become one of the focuses in the study of second language vocabulary acquisition. Those research achievements made by researchers from China and overseas not only improved public awareness towards the effectiveness of incidental vocabulary acquisition, but also broadened the thought of second language vocabulary teaching. There are many researchers pay much interests in incidental L2 vocabulary acquisition through reading, and their studies are based on the involvement load hypothesis (Hulstjin amp; Laufer, 2001; Wu, 2010; Huang, 2004), and also the input frequency hypothesis (Brown, Waring, amp; Donkaewbua, 2008; Vidal, 2003, 2011) and input-output hypothesis (Lei, 2011; Wang, Yao, amp; Xu, 2012). However, little research has been done to explore whether the involvement load hypothesis can explain the incidental L2vocabulary acquisition through listening.

1.2 Research purposes

This research was designed to see how the listening task type affect on EFL learner’s individual word acquisition, thereby to see how the involvement load hypothesis and the input-output hypothesis contribute to incidental L2 vocabulary acquisition through listening. Hoping the findings of the research are valuable to EFL learners and teachers in the aspect of vocabulary learning and teaching by providing them with some useful suggestions.

2. LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 Incidental L2 vocabulary acquisition

Usually, second language vocabulary acquisition can be divided into acquiring intentionally and incidentally by judging whether learners focus their attention on the word or not. The concept of incidental vocabulary acquisition was defined by Nagy, Herman and Anderson in 1985 on the basis of a study on children’s native language acquisition. It means that students attention is not on remembering new words but they acquire them unconsciously when they are doing other tasks, like reading and communication (Schmidt 1994:165-210). According to Nagy et al. (1985), a big number of the first language vocabulary knowledge children acquired is neither by consulting dictionary, nor from the formal classroom instruction. Instead, they gain those vocabulary in their daily life, such as communicating with others, reading stories, listening to radios and watching TV series and so on. Brown et al. (1999) pointed out that the term of incidental vocabulary acquisition can also be applied in second language acquisition. Wesche and Paribakht (1999) indicated that incidental vocabulary acquisition happens when learners focus on the meaning of the text they read, and not when paying attention to unknown words.

Hulstjin and Laufer (2001) thought the incidental acquisition as by-product of reading and listening activities not merely focus on vocabulary learning. As relative to incidental vocabulary acquisition, Hulstjin and Laufer (2001) stated that intentional vocabulary acquisition as the activity aimed at purposely memorizing lexical information and making that information be accessible to read. Hulstjin and Laufer (2001) argued that：

…in experiments that investigating incidental vocabulary learning, learners are required to complete a task involving the processing of some information without being told that they will be tested latter on their recall of that information. In contrast, participants in an intentional learning situation are told in advance that they will be tested afterwards on their recall. (p.10).

On the basis of the experiment many researchers conducted, the differences between incidental second language vocabulary acquisition and intentional second language vocabulary acquisition lie in whether participants’ attention is on vocabulary or not (Wesche amp; Parbakht, 1999), and whether the participants are told of the upcoming vocabulary test before learning (Eysenck, 1982).

In conclusion, when learners are busy with some other activities like reading, listening, writing or speaking, and they paid no intention to learn new words but acquired new words incidentally—at this time, incidental L2 vocabulary acquisition takes place.

2.2 The involvement load hypothesis and incidental L2 vocabulary acquisition

With regard to incidental vocabulary learning, (Laufer amp; Hulstijn, 2001) tentatively proposed the notion of the Involvement Load Hypothesis. The involvement load hypothesis has been developed based on the framework of depth of processing which was first proposed by (Craik amp; Lockhart, 1972). They recommended that retention in the long-term memory depends on how deeply information is processed during learning. Involvement is perceived as a motivational- cognitive construct, and retention of unfamiliar words is claimed to be conditional upon the amount of involvement while processing these words. (Laufer amp; Hulstijn, 2001) propose that the construct of involvement is composed of three components: need, search, and evaluation.

Need, as the motivational, non-cognitive dimension of involvement, is concerned with a drive to accomplish the task requirements, imposed either internally or externally, which is also used to distinguish between moderate and strong need. According to Laufer amp; Hulstijn, (2001), need can occur in two degrees of prominences: moderate and strong. Need is hypothesized to be moderate when it is imposed by an external agent, for example, when the teacher asks students to use a word in a sentence. Need is strong when it is intrinsically motivated and self-imposed by the learners, for instance, when learners decide to look up a word in a dictionary while writing a composition.

Search is the attempt to find the meaning of an unfamiliar L2 word by consulting dictionaries, or the attempt to find the L2 word from expressing a concept by asking a language teacher, for example, trying to find the L1 translation of an L2 unknown word by looking it up in a dictionary. Although need has two degrees of prominence, i.e., either moderate or strong, there are two degrees of prominence for search. It is either present with index “1” or absent with index “0”. When the meaning of an unknown word is given, that is, the attempt of search is not required, search is absent.

Evaluation entails a comparison of a given word with other words, a specific meaning of a word with its other meanings, or combining the word with other words in order to assess whether a word does or does not fit its context. Evaluation comprises of two potential degrees of cognitive processing: moderate and strong. Evaluation is moderate when learners must recognize differences between words provided in a given context (e. g. deciding which meaning of the target word best fits the context in which it is encountered), and evaluation is strong when the task requires making decisions about new words and combining them with known words in original contexts (e. g. sentence and composition writing).

Hulstijn and Laufer (2001) indicates that when testing the effect of task-induced involvement on incidental L2 vocabulary acquisition, the task with higher involvement loads contribute better vocabulary acquisition than the task with lower involvement loads. Furthermore, tasks inducing the same amount of involvement load result in the same vocabulary acquisition. As they stated, retention of unknown words was determined by the degree of involvement while processing words.

• 1. Empirical studies on incidental L2 vocabulary acquisition through reading

Although the research on incidental L2 vocabulary has not been that thorough yet, it has a relative wide range. In a certain degree, EFL learners can incidentally acquire some words when they are practicing other skills or communicating in second language. Gai (2003) declared that the number of studies on L2 incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading is the most. According to Hulstijn and Laufer (2001), reading is a very effective way to enlarge L2 vocabulary scale. Many factors should be considered in the research on L2 incidental vocabulary acquisition.

One of the factors is related to EFL learners. The language aspect and the non-language aspect are concluded. Language-related factors mainly refer to vocabulary size of L2 (Gai, 2003; Wu et al., 2010) and L2 proficiency (Pulido, 2003; Lei, 2011); non-language-related factors contain L2 vocabulary learning motivation (Wu et al., 2010), metal cognitive strategies (Chang amp; Li, 2009), the amount of attention learners paid to target words when reading (Zhou amp; Lv, 2010; Xu, 2012), L2 vocabulary learning strategies (Gu amp; Song, 2010; Weshce amp; Paribakht, 1999) and other internal driving factors of EFL learners.

The other factor affecting EFL vocabulary acquisition involves the context where new words appear, how familiar they are with the topic and how many times they encounter the word. The function of context (Nagy et al., 1985; Swanborn amp; de Glopper, 2002) and familiarity of the text topic (Pulido, 2003), the effect of meeting times with unfamiliar words have attracted the interest of many researchers (Laufer amp; Rozovski-Roitblat, 2011; Eckerth amp; Tavakoli, 2012; Yue, Dai, amp; Zhang, 2012; Webb, 2007). Their results show that EFL learners are more likely to acquire new words which they encounter frequently.

Apart from those factors I mentioned before, there has aroused a renewed interest in the functions of input enhancement and reading with word-focused tasks in L2 vocabulary acquisition. The former one refers to the methods used to draw EFL learners’ attention to target words. The reading with word-focused tasks aims to highlight the target words.

Most previous researches have investigated how annotation, glossing, bold and italic styles of target words affect incidental second language vocabulary acquisition (Hulstijn, Hollander, amp; Greidanus, 1996; Hill amp; Laufer, 2003; Zhou amp; Lv, 2010).

Respecting the word-focused tasks in reading, Hulstijn and Laufer (2001) summarized many empirical studies for the effects of many different word-focused tasks on the basis of the involvement load hypothesis, such as multiple choice glossed, fill-in blank, composition and sentence writing on the second language incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading (Wesche amp; Paribakht, 1999; Keating, 2008). They pointed out that a deeper level’s process of the word or a high involvement load is required to do a task which produces superior effects on vocabulary acquisition than do other tasks. In addition, some researchers also further the study of various aspects by considering the interfering factors, such as task time (Keating, 2008; Wu, 2010; Llach, 2009). Although Hulstijn and Laufer’s research (2001) focused only on the acquisition of receptive individual words through second language reading. Some researchers have investigated how the acquisition of collocations or phrases is achieved under different task-induced involvements (Webb et al., 2013; Zhou, 2009; Zhou amp; Lv, 2010; Wei amp; Wang, 2011) and whether there exist any differences in productive and receptive knowledge of L2 vocabulary acquisition (Keating, 2008; Webb, 2005; Yue et al., 2012). On one hand, some researchers have also investigated how the output tasks affect incidental second language vocabulary acquisition through reading. On the other hand, according to the output hypothesis (Swain amp; Lapkin, 1995), Ellis and He (1999), Huang et al. (2012), and de la Fuente (2002) have found that output task can effectively facilitate the incidental vocabulary acquisition.

• 1. Problems in the previous studies

Although previous studies on incidental L2 vocabulary acquisition have been reviewed and it can set up a theoretical foundation for the current research, there remain some problems in the previous research.

First of all, until now, L2 researchers mainly have done research on how reading promotes incidental L2 vocabulary acquisition based on the theories like the input-output hypothesis, the involvement load hypothesis and the input frequency hypothesis. Few researchers have explored the L2 vocabulary acquisition through L2 listening with the help of written text (audio-visual input mode or captions), but it is not obvious whether the L2 vocabulary acquisition is achieved through the reading texts or through the aural input.

Secondly, little research has studied the effect of listening task type on L2 incidental vocabulary learning, especially the L2 incidental acquisition of individual words.

Finally, incidental acquisition of L2 individual words has been investigated in different modes. But few studies have tried to compare the differences between different tasks in both receptive and productive knowledge, especially under the conditions of listening.

3. METHODOLOGY

3.1 Research questions

This study investigates how different listening tasks affect EFL learners’ vocabulary acquisition. To be specific, it addresses the following two questions:

1. Is there any significant difference between the gap-filling task and the multiple-choice task in contributing to EFL learners’ receptive vocabulary knowledge of the target words?
2. Is there any significant difference between the gap-filling task and the multiple-choice task in contributing to EFL learners’ productive vocabulary knowledge of the target words?

3.2 Listening material and tasks

This section reports how the listening materials were chosen and how the tasks were defined.

Passage. The listening materials should be chosen by two significant criteria. One of the criteria was that the difficulty of the text should be appropriate for participants in this study. The other one was that the topic was expected to be unfamiliar but attractive to participants, because interesting subjects would attract participants to focus on the listening materials, meanwhile the familiar topic contributes to text comprehension and incidental vocabulary acquisition.

Given the language proficiency of the participants, three listening passages which were chosen from CET-6 model listening tests were adopted in this study. These three passages were recorded in standard English with American accents. Moreover, the recording was quite clear without any background noise. The length of these passages was approximately equal (2 minutes): the first one includes 276 words, and the second and the third one includes 246 and 218 words. What’s more, two professional English teachers predicted that , in the three passages, the percentages of possible unknown words were 2.8%, 3.8% and3.6%, which indicated that the difficulty levels of these passages were appropriate for these participants.

Task. Two different tasks were related to the listening material. The first task involved multiple-choice related to the target words appearing in the listening passages. The second task consisted of gap-filling exercises, where the target words should be filled in the blanks.

1. Group 1 (N =25): Listening comprehension twice plus three choices. Participants in group 1 were asked to listen to three passages twice and answer ten multiple-choice questions for each passage.
2. Group 2 (N =25): Listening comprehension twice plus gap-filling. Participants in group 2 were asked to listen to the same passages twice but instead of ten multiple-choice question, they should fill in ten blanks in each passage after listening.

3.3 Procedure of data collection

The experiment was administered to 50 sophomores of English learners, coming from two intact classes in Nanjing Tech University.

Those students were given the corresponding listening-related tasks and L2 incidental vocabulary acquisition test. All the participants were assigned into two groups at random and completed the tests in the two different classrooms for the different listening tasks. The instructor in each classroom needed to take charge of handing out and handing in the papers. All the participants were required to listen to the same passages to get a general idea of them. And they were asked to achieve different tasks when listening. Because the time on task was considered an inherent property of a task (Hulstijn amp; Laufer, 2001), to decrease the interference of time, the participants at the same level of input frequency were asked to finish the different listening tasks within the same time. One sheet of multiple-choice questions and the other sheet of gap-filling exercises were given to the two groups. In this study, all the participants didn’t know there would be a vocabulary test for them later. After the data were all collected, the participants could have a 10-minutes’ break.

After that, all the participants were given an immediate L2 incidental vocabulary acquisition test. 25-minutes’ later, all the test papers were collected to make a subsequent analysis.

3.4 Scoring methods

Every participant’s acquisition of receptive and productive knowledge of each target word was measured on Min’s (2008) modified 4-item VKS in which each item was awarded zero point or one point. Because this research was aimed at studying the respective and productive word knowledge, thus only the last two items were scored.

The aim of the third item was to test the participants’ L2 receptive vocabulary knowledge, and its scoring method was demonstrated as follows:

0 point: the synonym or translation of the target word was not given correctly.

1 point: the meaning of the target word was given correctly. No punishment would be given even if wrong Chinese characters or Chinese phonetic symbols were used to replace right Chinese characters in the translation.

The aim of the forth item was to test the participants’ L2 productive vocabulary knowledge, and its scoring method was similar to that of the third item.

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