Experiment 1 compared a story method and a list method. In both cases, subjects retained 13% of the new words one week later, but the rate of acquisition/learning using the story method was more efficient, almost twice as fast as the list method.

Experiments 2 and 3 differed in several ways: Different storytellers were used and different stories were told, students were slightly more advanced in German in study 3, one story was used in study 2, but three different unrelated stories were used in study 3, and study 3 contained less focus on form: students were not given a list of the words with correct translations nor the text in German after the story, as they were in study 2, nor were they given feedback on their post-test results. They were focused on form in study 3, but not as much as in study 2.

Vocabulary growth occurred in three studies, however, which suggests that the corrective feedback given in study 2 was not necessary for vocabulary acquisition to occur. The results also show that adult foreign language students at the beginning level can acquire vocabulary through story listening, just as children can (Elley, 1989). In fact, our results are reasonably close to Elley’s in terms of percentage of words learned: The conditions in our second study were nearly identical to those in Elley’s "reading with explanation" condition, and the results were similar: In his study, eight year olds heard the same story three times, and teachers explained the meanings of words as they occurred, in ways similar to that done here. Testing was done one week after the last reading. For one story, students identified 40% of the unfamiliar words, in another, 17%. In experiment two, students were able to identify 35% of the unknown words on the immediate test and 16% on the delayed test that was given four to seven weeks later.

The forgetting rate of the list method is clearly much faster than the story method. With the story method remembering went down from 58% to 12% in 7 weeks (study three), but with the list method it went down from 65% to 14% in just two weeks.

In studies two and three, the rate of vocabulary acquisition/learning was about six words per hour. This was not as high as reported for English vocabulary in a study of English as a foreign language in Japan (rate = .25 words per minute; Mason and Krashen, 2004); the subjects in the EFL study were more advanced, however, which meant it was easier to make stories comprehensible.

We were unable to determine the relative contributions of language acquisition and language learning in this study (but see Mason and Krashen, 2004). What is clear, however, is that gains in vocabulary occurred merely from presenting words in stories, without pre-teaching and without supplementary vocabulary study and without feedback on results, gains that could extrapolate to several hundred words per semester if more storytelling is included.

We estimated from examining texts used in the classes that German students had learned or acquired about 300 to 500 words, about .04 words per minute (200 hours = 12000 minutes. 500/12000=0.04 words per minute). Devoting just 30 hours over the year to storytelling would mean 180 words gained, an increase of about 108 words over the usual amount of vocabulary learned. [At .04 words per minute, or 2.4 words per hour, 30 hours would result in 72 words. At .10 words per minute, or six words per hour, 30 hours would result in 180 words. The difference is 108 words.]

Obvious flaws in these studies are that no comparison group was used, and there were only six to seven participants. The target words, however, were not used in class during the time between the story listening and the delayed testing, nor did students have any obvious source of German outside of class.

Teachers of German as a foreign language should be especially interested in these results. As English has become the world language, and other foreign languages have become less popular (e.g. Dornyei, Csizer, and Nemeth, 2006), the use of an easier and faster way of acquiring foreign language vocabulary may save the less popular languages from disappearing from foreign language programs in schools.

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