Discussion

The treatment in this study was a combination of focus on form deliberate learning and acquisition from comprehensible input. The pre-test clearly signalled to students that vocabulary was the focus of the activity, the storyteller confirmed this by explaining and illustrating the meaning of target words, and the students were continuously focused on the words during the telling of the story. There was, however, no "study" of vocabulary before the story was told, nor was there any between the post-test and the delayed post-test, and students listened to a comprehensible and (we hope) interesting story.

It is thus impossible to determine how much of the gain in vocabulary was due to "learning" and how much was due to "acquisition." On a practical level, however, the results of this study tell us that vocabulary gains are possible when new words are presented in the context of a story, without additional vocabulary activities.

In this study students received corrective feedback and after the lesson they took the list of the words with Japanese definitions and the original text home. In experiment 3, corrective feedback was deleted from the instruction, and the list of words with Japanese definitions and text were not given to the students.

Experiment 3

The procedure in experiment 2 included both obvious focus on form and comprehensible input. Experiment 3 was designed to determine whether vocabulary development could take place with less form-focus. In addition, we attempted to determine the efficiency of vocabulary development again. In the second experiment, the teacher gave the list of the words, the Japanese definitions of the words on the list, and the text to the students after each session. The students might have studied the words during the vacation. In experiment 3, this was not done; corrective feedback was not given after storytelling and the text and the list with Japanese definitions was not given to the students.

Participants

The participants were the same class of students who participated in the second experiment. This time the experiment was conducted in late June and July in the 5th semester. By then, students had had, at most, 270 hours of classroom instruction in German.

Treatment Change

In the second experiment, the same story was continued during the three sessions (over 3 weeks), but in this study three different short fairy tales were read (The Frog Prince, Little Red Riding Hood, and Hansel and Gretel), one in each session. The number of target words for each story was 20. The procedure was the same as in the previous study, except that this time the participants were not given the Japanese definitions of the words after the post-test, and the text and list of words were not given to the students after the session. In addition, a different native speaker German teacher told the stories.

The delayed post-test was given four weeks after the last session. As one student was absent for one story, her data was deleted from the analysis. Thus, six students participated in experiment 3. Table 4 lists the features of the two experiments.

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