Discussion

The goal of the first study was to determine whether beginning level college G2FL students would be able to benefit from hearing a story in class for effective vocabulary acquisition/learning. The answer is yes: Students using the story method were more efficient in vocabulary acquisition/learning. The results are in agreement with those of a previous study using English as a foreign language (Mason, 2005).

The goal of the second study was to determine whether the same result would be observed using the story method with more exposure to stories. This time a single story was divided into three parts, each session lasting 30 minutes. The delayed post-test was 4 weeks after part 3 of the story was presented.

Experiment 2

Participants

The participants were seven different college G2FL students with no previous experience in German in secondary school. Six out of the seven students were second year students from various departments, such as education, sociology, and English/American Literature. The last one was a fourth year student from the English/American Literature department who had not taken German in her 3rd year. The students had taken German classes in their first year, and had attended the classes twice a week (90 minutes per lesson) for two semesters. The second year they attended German classes four times a week (90 minutes each). At the time of this study they had had a total of about 200 hours of classroom instruction. None of these students had participated in the first study.

Treatment

The class followed Themen Neu 1, a coursebook based on the communicative approach. The four classes per week were taught by a native Japanese teacher and a native German teacher as a team. The research project started at the beginning of December. To ensure students had enough competence to understand a story told by a native speaker of German, the study was done toward the end of the fourth semester.

When storytelling was introduced into the lessons, the students were told that the storytelling was just additional practice to improve their listening comprehension and vocabulary, and that no additional study of the words used in the story was required. The students were not told that a delayed post-test would be given.

In each class session of the treatment, students listened to a story told by a native speaker of German. The students followed the course book during the rest of the class-time. The students listened to a detective story divided into three parts on three separate days, on consecutive class meetings, once a week for three weeks. The last session was completed before the Christmas break.

The three sessions were structured as follows: The students received a piece of paper with all the German words and phrases from the story thought to be unfamiliar to them. They were asked to translate all the words on the list they knew in advance into Japanese. This was the pre-test.

Then the German teacher told the story, giving explanations in German for the unknown words as the story proceeded. To aid comprehension, pictures were drawn on the blackboard and miniature objects were shown. The students were also encouraged to exchange ideas about the meaning of new words and phrases in Japanese among themselves. As soon as the students felt that they understood the meaning of a new word or phrase, they wrote down the Japanese equivalent on their sheet. This was considered to be the post-test, but it occurred as the students were hearing the story.

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