The Effects of Bottom-Up, Interactive and Top-Down Listening on L2 Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Department of English Language, Qaemshahr Branch, Islamic Azad University, Qaemahar, Iran

2 Department of English Language, Sari Branch, Islamic Azad University, Sari, Iran

3 Department of English Language, Qaemshahr Branch, Islamic Azad University, Qaemshahr, Iran

Abstract

Although previous research studies have shown that the rate of incidental vocabulary acquisition through listening is affected by various factors such as gloss type and listening proficiency (Çekiç, 2022; Zhang & Graham, 2020), the effects of top-down, bottom-up and interactive listening on incidental acquisition of words have not been examined. The present study, therefore, was aimed to examine the effects in a university laboratory. A group of 90 lower-intermediate English language learners majoring in dentistry and medical sciences took part in the study. The participants were between 19 and 24 years old and Key English Test (KET) was employed to assess their proficiency. Learners’ knowledge of the new words was assessed before and after listening using Vocabulary Knowledge Scale (VKS). Descriptive statistics, t-test and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) were run to examine the differences in vocabulary acquisition before and immediately after the learners listened to the audio clips. The results indicated that the learners in the three groups were equally able to acquire the new words and there were not any statistically significant differences in the effects of the three types of processing (bottom-up, interactive and top-down) on L2 incidental vocabulary acquisition. Implications of the findings will be discussed.

Keywords

Interdisciplinary Studies in English Language Teaching
Volume 01, Issue 2
July 2023
Pages 166-177

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