Effects Of English Songs Listening On Incidental Acquisition Of English Vocabulary Learning

Most Chinese students feel a little nervous in their listening classes. Teachers need totry to find an effective way to relax their students in classes; therefore, using themethod of listening to English songs, they can gain some new and useful wordsthrough understanding the content at the same time guessing the meaning of thescripts, i.e. Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition. Nowadays, with the rapiddevelopment of video technique, English songs are widely used in English Teachingand music has become an integral and important part of our daily life, especially thesongs to the young people.This thesis was based on the theory of Krashen’s Input Hypothesis and Schmidt’sNoticing Hypothesis to research students’ vocabulary obtained by listening toEnglish songs, accordingly came to a conclusion that English songs listening canaffect second language acquisition, and then provided and confirmed this effectivemethod for the students. This paper investigated how different listening purposes canaffect students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition among sixty English majors, andthe study worked for applying itself to the effects of English songs listening onincidental acquisition. The following questions have been addressed in our previous study:(1) Whether listening to English songs can promote incidental vocabularyacquisition?(2) Whether different listening tasks can affect incidental vocabulary acquisition?(3) Whether the parts of vocabulary knowledge can be kept in student’s mind morethan one week?(4) Whether the student’s vocabulary size can affect their incidental vocabularyacquisition?According to our experiment conclusion and combined the previous research, thefinal result indicates that different tasks in varying degrees to increase secondlanguage incidental vocabulary acquisition, while " listening to the song then torepeat the task " our incidental vocabulary acquisition improvement is much betterthan the other two tasks," listening to the song then to answer questions " and "listen to songs free then to take notes." Meanwhile, a week delayed tests displayedthat some vocabulary knowledge gained by listening to the songs can keep along-term memory about a week. In addition, rich vocabulary can supply morefavorable conditions to improve incidental vocabulary acquisition; while the largeamount of vocabulary students had significant advantages than small vocabulary ofthe students. Moreover, this research had some teaching and learning ideas forteachers and students. Therefore, teachers should reinforce the environment of theEnglish songs teaching tasks. In a word, through the investigation we determined that:the way by listening to English songs can help students get vocabulary knowledge,and some related teaching methods surely had the same effect.