Is Form-Focused Vocabulary Instruction Worthwhile?

Abstract

Hearing stories can result in considerable incidental vocabulary development, for both first and second language acquisition (e.g. Elley 1992; Robbins and Ehri 1994; Senechal, LeFevre, Hudson and Lawson 1996). It has also been claimed, however, that direct instruction is more effective than incidental vocabulary acquisition and that combining both approaches will be more effective than incidental acquisition alone (Coady 1997). In this study, we compare vocabulary growth in English as a foreign language through hearing a story with a combination of a story and supplementary activities designed to focus students specifically on learning the new words in the story. Subjects were first-year Japanese female students at a junior college in Osaka. One class was the ‘story-only’ group and the other was the ‘story-plus study’ group. The story-only group spent only 15 minutes hearing a story. The story-plus study group spent nearly the entire class period (85 minutes) hearing the story and doing supplementary activities. Calculations of words learned per minute revealed that the story-only group learned words more efficiently. The results suggest that additional focus on form in the form of traditional vocabulary exercises is not as efficient as hearing words in the context of stories.