It has been demonstrated that hearing stories can result in considerable incidental vocabulary development, for both first and second language acquisition (for evidence from readalouds, see e.g. Elley, 1992; Robbins and Ehri, 1994; Senechal, LeFevre, Hudson and Lawon, 1996). It has also been claimed, however, that direct instruction is more effective than incidental vocabulary acquisition and that combining both approaches will be more effective than incidental acquisition alone (Coady, 1997).

In this study, we examine this claim. We compare vocabulary growth in English as a foreign language through hearing a story with a combination of a story and supplementary activities designed to focus students specifically on learning the new words in the story. We report not only the gains in vocabulary with each method, but also the efficiency, that is, the number of words gained per minute of exposure: We expect students who have had supplementary vocabulary exercises to gain more vocabulary, simply because they have had more exposure to the words. The crucial issue is whether the time was wisely spent.

Method

Subjects were 58 first year Japanese female students at a junior college in Osaka. The students had had very little previous exposure to aural input in English. Their average score on the listening section of the TOEIC was 150 out of 495 and 125 out of 495 on the reading section, which is approximately equal to a TOEFL score of between 350 and 400. One class (n=27) was the "story-only" group and the other class (n=31) was the "story-plus-study" group.

Procedure. The story-only group experienced the following method:
(1) Twenty target words from a story were written on the board in front of the class.
(2) The subjects took a translation test (pretest) on the target words (5 minutes). They were asked to write a Japanese definition for each English word on the list.
(3) The students put down the paper and pencil and listened to a story (The Three Little Pigs), which contained the target words. The teacher told the story in English (15 minutes).
(4) The students took the posttest on the same list of the words (5 minutes).

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