The Role Of Output In Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

In recent years, vocabulary acquisition has been paid more and more attention to inthe second language teaching and research. Vocabulary learning plays a key role in thesecond language acquisition. Incidental vocabulary acquisition (IVA) has been aneffective method in second language learning. Previous literature has proved that learnerscan acquire vocabulary incidentally through reading but the research on incidentalvocabulary acquisition through listening is rarely explored. This thesis reports anempirical study conducted in listening class in the light of incidental acquisitionhypothesis, output hypothesis and interaction hypothesis. The focus of the study is toinvestigate which type of output is more effective in promoting incidental vocabularyacquisition, the oral output or the written output. The research questions are as follows:First, can the second language learners acquire vocabulary incidentally in a listening class?Second, if the answer is positive, which one is more effective to promote incidentalvocabulary acquisition, oral output or written output? Third, does listening proficiency ofthe learners have an effect on the retention of the incidental vocabulary of the learners?The subjects of this study are70second-year college students at Shandong Universityof Finance and Economics. They are divided into two groups: oral output group andwritten output group. The whole experiment lasts three weeks and it includes three steps.They are pre-test, immediate test and post test. And then the researcher uses PairedSample test and Independent Sample test to find answers to the research questions. Theresearch findings are summarized as the following: First, second language learners canacquire vocabulary incidentally when they are engaged in the listening task. Second,between the written output group and the oral output group, the later can outperform theformer in terms of both incidental vocabulary acquisition and the retention of theincidental vocabulary. Third, the correlation between English listening proficiency andretention of the incidental vocabulary is more obvious for the oral output group than forthe written output group.According to the study, output in listening class plays an important role in incidentalvocabulary acquisition, which is of great theoretical and practical significance. Theoretically, this research confirms the incidental vocabulary acquisition theory inChinese language learning context and it also broadens the research scope of incidentalvocabulary acquisition. Practically, the research not only provides new method to enlargevocabulary for second language learners but also sheds light on the reform of listeningclass in colleges.