< Terug naar vorige pagina

Publicatie

When input meets output? Empirical investigations into the impact of input and output tasks on L2 vocabulary acquisition and use

Boek - Dissertatie

There is great consensus that second language (L2) learning is hard to take place without some sort of input (Gass, 1999) and opportunities for output production (Swain, 2005). Despite an extensive body of empirical studies exploring the impact of various types of input (see Webb, 2020) or output tasks (see Plonsky & Kim, 2016) on L2 learning, little research has looked into the effects of input and output tasks on different aspects of lexical knowledge and use. To fill in these gaps, three experimental studies were conducted. The first study explored the differential effects of input- and output-based tasks on written word knowledge. The study adopted a pretest-posttest design. An experimental group (n = 30) completed both input- and output- tasks in a counterbalanced way and a control group (n = 30) who only did the tests without doing the tasks. The target items (10 single words and 10 compounds) were counterbalanced across the tasks. Vocabulary gains were measured at four levels of sensitivity: spontaneous use, form recall, meaning recall and meaning recognition. We found that both task types resulted in word learning, but the input-based tasks resulted in higher vocabulary gains at the meaning recall level, whereas the output-based tasks resulted in better scores in the form recall test. No difference was found in the spontaneous use and meaning recognition tests. The second study also investigated the differential effects of input-based and output-based but focused on spoken word knowledge. The study further compared gains obtained from the input- and output-based tasks with gains from input-only with no follow-up tasks. The study employed a pretest-posttest design with two groups: an experimental group (n=32) who completed both spoken input- and output-based tasks and an input-only group (n=12) who were only exposed to L2 input. Vocabulary gains were measured at three aspects: oral spontaneous use, oral form recall and meaning recall. The findings showed that the input-based tasks resulted in higher gains at all levels than the input-only condition, whereas no difference in gains was found between the input-based and output-based tasks. We conducted a third experiment to further explore the effect of input and output tasks. In this study, we investigated the impact of L2 input, L2 input repetition, and task repetition on different aspects of lexical use (i.e., lexical mining, lexical diversity, lexical complexity) and fluency in L2 oral performance. Ninety participants were randomly allocated to three groups: an input group (n=32), an input repetition group (n=29), and a control group (n=29). The input group watched L2 videos followed by an immediate oral task, whereas the input repetition group could watch the videos again after the immediate oral task. The control group only performed the oral tasks without watching the videos. After two days, all groups repeated the same oral task. Additionally, we measured learners' prior vocabulary knowledge by means of a receptive size test and a productive levels test. Working memory was measured by three tests: a forward-digit span test, a backward digit-span test, and an operation-span task. Several main findings were found. First, the participants exposed to the videos could mine both single words and formulaic sequences in the immediate and the repeat oral task. Second, learners exposed to input seemed to produce words with less variety in the repeat task. They also used fewer low-frequency words and spoke at slower rate than those who were not exposed to the input. Third, we did not find any effect of input repetition and task repetition on all aspects of lexical use and fluency. Last but not least, we found that learners' prior vocabulary knowledge and working memory seemed to be good predictors of lexical use and fluency. In particular, learners with larger receptive vocabulary size tended to mine more words and pause less within the clauses in the repeat task. Learners with greater executive working memory capacity tended to use more low-frequency words, while those with greater capacity in storing and manipulatin information spoke faster and paused more frequently at the end of clauses in the repeat task.
Jaar van publicatie:2021
Toegankelijkheid:Embargoed