The three experiments here were replications of the experiments done using EFL college students in Japan (Mason, 2005; Mason & Krashen, 2004), which investigated the value of hearing stories in a language class for vocabulary acquisition/learning. The results of the three experiments confirmed the results of the previous studies although the language used in these experiments was the students' second foreign language, which was less familiar and less accessible to the participants.

Experiment 1

Participants

The participants were seven 2nd year German as a 2nd foreign language (G2FL) students from various departments such as education, sociology, and English/American Literature. All were in the German C – class (3rd semester) at a four-year college in Osaka, Japan. They had no previous experience in German study in their secondary schools.

The German C class was held twice a week for 90 minutes. The participants had participated in German A (one semester) and B (one semester) classes before, which were also held twice a week for 90 minutes. The estimated class hours by the time of this experiment were about 100 hours.

Although the seven subjects had all been learning German for the same amount of time and under similar circumstances, there was some variability among them in terms of German competence.

The class followed Themen Neu 1, a course book based on the communicative approach. The two classes per week were taught by a native Japanese teacher and a native German teacher as a team. The participants had never heard a story told in German by a native speaker of German before.

Questions

The participants took part in two different experiments (A and B) about vocabulary acquisition/learning. In experiment A, vocabulary should be gained (acquired or learned) and remembered simply by listening to a story. In experiment B, a traditional method was used, namely, simple word-explanation with translation. The questions investigated were:

Experiment A: Story-hearing Procedure

One week before the experiment took place, the subjects were given a list with 36 words (various categories), which would later be included in the story, in order to determine which words students were already familiar with. As expected, there was some variability among the students.

On the day of the experiment, the 36 words were written on the black board before the story was told. Pictures, drawings and gestures were used to help make the story comprehensible. Every time one of the 36 words appeared in the story, the teacher pointed at it on the black board. If students failed to get the meaning of a word through pictures, drawing and gestures, translation was given. The story-telling as such took approximately 20 minutes.

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