The Effects Of Different Tasks On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition In Audio-Visual-Oral Mode

Vocabulary plays a critical role in the field of second language acquisition. In recent years, incidental vocabulary learning which acts as one of the ways of vocabulary learning has been the concern of scholars. Researchers have done quite lots of research on incidental vocabulary acquisition (IVA). The term of "incidental vocabulary acquisition" was first put forward in the research of how children learn vocabulary in their native language. Compared with the intentional vocabulary acquisition, IVA refers to the learning of vocabulary as the by-product of any activity not explicitly geared to vocabulary learning. When looking back on extensive studies done on IVA, there are many focused on highlighting words through extensive reading but quite few explorations made in IVA in other modes, especially in audio-visual-oral mode. This paper, which is categorized as an empirical study, aims at exploring the effects of different oral tasks on IVA in audio-visual-oral mode.The subjects in this research were49freshmen who were from two audio-visual classes in Central South University. They were asked to conduct different oral tasks after watching an authentic English film clip with bilingual subtitles in three times. Then an immediate post-test with a questionnaire chart was carried out. A delayed post-test was held after one week, and the other was exerted one month later.The test of IVA consisted of a vocabulary test and a questionnaire chart. The data was analyzed through SPSS13.0. The research findings are summarized as follows:1. The incidental vocabulary acquisition does exist in audio-visual-oral mode.2. The retention of IVA influenced by two watching tasks in audio-visual-oral mode can last for at least one month in long-term memory.3. The two different oral tasks (retelling and dubbing) do not have significantly different effects on IVA in audio-visual-oral mode. The data in audio-visual-oral mode does not support the involvement load hypothesis. And it still needs to be certified and improved. Meanwhile, task types may affect the degree of IVA. The degree of IVA aroused by the retelling task is mainly on "the pronunciation is grasped" and "the spelling is memorized", while, the degree of IVA aroused by the dubbing task is mainly on "the word is familiar" and "the pronunciation is grasped".4. The participants do better than the bystanders in IVA to some extent, especially conducting the retell task. But there is no significant difference between the participants and the bystanders when they perform the dubbing task. From it, the author concludes that task requirements and motivation may affect the incidental vocabulary acquisition. From the perspective of audio-visual-oral mode, this paper mainly studies the different effects of two oral tasks on incidental vocabulary acquisition. To some extent, it has been proved that acquiring words incidentally is possible in audio-visual-oral mode. Teachers should select proper audio-visual materials and design scientific and reasonable oral tasks to guide students to get better vocabulary learning.