Vocabulary learning through listening: comparing L2 explanations, teacher codeswitching, contrastive focus-on form and incidental learning

Zhang, P. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2136-4984 and Graham, S. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7743-3977 (2020) Vocabulary learning through listening: comparing L2 explanations, teacher codeswitching, contrastive focus-on form and incidental learning. Language Teaching Research, 24 (6). pp. 765-784. ISSN 1477-0954 doi: 10.1177/1362168819829022

Abstract/Summary

This study explored the teaching and learning of vocabulary through listening among 137 senior high-school EFL learners in China. It compared different types of Lexical Focus-on-Form delivered to four treatment groups: post-listening vocabulary explanations in the L2; codeswitched explanations; explanations providing additional crosslinguistic information (Contrastive Focus-on-Form, CFoF); and no explanations (NE). It also investigated the impact of the intervention on learners’ listening comprehension. Learners completed aural vocabulary tests at pre-, post- and delayed post-test and listening assessments at pre- and post-test. For short and long-term vocabulary acquisition, the three groups receiving explanations significantly outperformed the NE group. Gains for the CFoF group were significantly greater than for the L2 and Codeswitching groups, for both short-term and long-term learning. For listening comprehension, only the NE group made significant improvement from the pre-test to the post-test, as well as making significantly greater pre to post-test improvement than the CFoF and the L2 groups did. The paper concludes by discussing these findings in relation to theories of vocabulary acquisition and listening comprehension, as well as their pedagogical implications.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/81387
Identification Number/DOI	10.1177/1362168819829022
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Interdisciplinary Research Centres (IDRCs) > Centre for Literacy and Multilingualism (CeLM) Arts, Humanities and Social Science > Institute of Education > Language and Literacy in Education
Publisher	Sage
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