The Efficiency of Self-Selected Reading and Hearing Stories on Adult Second Language Acquisition

Beniko Mason
Shitennoji International Buddhist University
benikomason@hotmail.com

Two groups of Japanese college students in Japan participated in an extensive reading class in which they listened to stories in English told by a teacher in class and read graded readers at home. One group consisted of English majors who took six other English classes using a form-based approach, and the other consisted of Health Science majors who took no other English classes. Both groups improved, but Health Science students' gains per hour of class-time were far greater; they were, in other words, more efficient.

Originally published in "Selected Papers from the sixteenth international symposium on English Teaching". English Teachers' Association / ROC Taipei, November 9-11, 2007. Pp. 630-633.

INTRODUCTION

The struggle between form-based and comprehensible-based methods is far from over. The research clearly supports the latter, but the former remains more popular in practice. Apparently, more empirical evidence is necessary to determine which approach is best.

This study contrasts students who participated in a comprehensible-input based class with those who were in a similar class but also had a considerable amount of form-based instruction in addition. We would expect some increase in gains with more instruction. The question, however, is whether the extra instruction was worth-while, that is, whether it was efficient.

PROCEDURE

Subjects

The participants were 16 first year students in the English department and 24 students in the Health Science department in a Junior College in Osaka, Japan. The students in the English department had seven English classes per week, and the Heath Science majors had only one class per week. The experiment was conducted in the second semester of their first year (12 weeks).

Treatment

Both groups received comprehension-based instruction once a week, for one hour, for one semester. Class-time was devoted to storytelling in which students were focused on the meaning and vocabulary of the story they were listening to. One story, from Grimm's Fairy Tales or other sources, was covered each session.

Target words, words thought to be unfamiliar to the students, were written on the board, and as the story was told, the teacher pointed to the words. Students raised their hands to indicate to the teacher when they did not understand the meaning of the word, which the teacher then explained or clarified using a drawing. Students were also provided with a list of the words on paper, as well as a written version of the story. Students were tested on the words they had encountered in previous stories at the beginning of the lesson each week.