Oral Input And Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

Vocabulary acquisition occupies a key position in learning a second language. How vocabulary is acquired and what the most effective means is to promote effective acquisition have been worthwhile lines of investigations in the field of SLA. As one of the vocabulary learning methods, incidental vocabulary acquisition has become a specifically popular subject. Many researches have proved that incidental vocabulary acquisition can occur through extensive reading. However, oral input is not favored as much as written input. So the current study chooses oral input as the topic to study, owing primarily to an increasing interest in communicative approach to language learning and the role of interaction in language acquisition.The current study is based on the three hypotheses: the incidental vocabulary learning hypothesis, the input hypothesis and the interaction hypothesis. It examines the extent to which the two types of input, namely interactionally modified input and premodified input, result in the acquisition of word meanings. In order to find the issues that need to be explored, the following questions are proposed:(1) Are the learners able to incidentally learn unknown words through oral input?(2) If the answer to the first question is positive, then what properties of input work for incidental vocabulary acquisition?(3) Do different types of input affect the learners'incidental vocabulary acquisition? And how do they affect?(4) Does such factors as learners'proficiency (especially listening comprehension proficiency) have an impact on incidental vocabulary acquisition in the same task?Fifty-nine students from Suzhou Vocational College participated in this experiment, who were divided into two groups, the interactionally modified input group and the premodified input group. The whole experiment consists of five parts: a pretest, a comprehension test, an acquisition test, six retention tests and a questionnaire. After collecting the scores of tests, the author used the statistic tool,...