A Comparative Study Of The Effects Of EFL Listening And Reading On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

Vocabulary has long been a very important field in second language learning teaching,and the acquisition of a large vocabulary is the basis of learning English successfully. Inrecent years, although more and more attention has been drawn to the issue of L2vocabulary acquisition, it still remains not clear as to how to improve the incidentalvocabulary acquisition. In spite of the fact that plenty of experimental researches haveverified the feasibility and effectiveness of incidental vocabulary acquisition throughreading input and listening input, there are few researches conducted on the comparisonbetween the effects of the two different input modes.The present study, based on Krashen’s input hypothesis, aims to examine the effectsof different input modes on the incidental vocabulary acquisition for English majors. To bespecific, two research questions are addressed in the study:1. Are there any differences between the effects of academic reading and academiclistening on EFL vocabulary acquisition? If yes, what are they?1) Are there any differences between the immediate effects of academic listening andacademic reading on EFL vocabulary acquisition? If yes, what are they?2) Are there any differences between the delayed effects of academic listening andacademic reading on EFL vocabulary acquisition? If yes, what are they?2. Are there any differences in the effects of students’ proficiency levels onvocabulary gains across academic listening and academic reading? If yes, what are they?1) Are there any differences in the effects of students’ proficiency levels onvocabulary gains across academic listening and academic reading as measured by theimmediate posttest vocabulary scores? If yes, what are they?2) Are there any differences in the effects of students’ proficiency levels onvocabulary gains across academic listening and academic reading as measured by thedelayed posttest vocabulary scores? If yes, what are they?In order to study the questions mentioned above, two second-year parallel classes andtwo third-year parallel classes of English majors in their first semester in a university wereselected as the subjects in the current experiment and two different tasks are designedaccording to different input modes:(1) listening to the material and then do the comprehension exercises;(2) reading the material and then do the correspondent exercises.These four classes were assigned to complete one of the tasks in the normal class time, andthen did the immediate and delayed posttests of the target words, the results of which wereanalyzed by the statistical software of SPSS.The results of this research demonstrate that:1) There are significant differences between the effects of academic reading andacademic listening on EFL vocabulary acquisition as measured by the immediate posttest,though there are no significant differences between the effects of academic reading andacademic listening on EFL vocabulary acquisition as measured by the delayed posttest.2)There are no significant differences in the effects of students’ proficiency levels onvocabulary gains across academic listening and academic reading as measured by both theimmediate posttest and the delayed posttest. To be precise, there are no significantdifferences between the second-year students and third-year students’ vocabulary gainsthrough reading as measured by both the immediate posttest and the delayed posttest. Thesame case is with listening.