Also, it is not clear if time is better spent on rehearing the same story or moving on to a new story. Several studies show that there is continued growth in vocabulary knowledge with each rehearing of a storybook (Eller, Pappas, and Brown, 1988), but there is some evidence for a diminished effect after a second reading (Lueng and Pikulski, 1990); Leung and Pikulski suggest that some listeners "seemed bored by the third reading" (p. 238). Our claim that hearing stories is more efficient than skill-building exercises may hold only for the first or first two hearings, while the story is still interesting.

It should also be pointed out that the gains seen for hearing stories may underestimate its effects. Listeners may have acquired vocabulary in the story that was not tested in this study. They could also have acquired other aspects of language, such as grammar.

Finally, it has been firmly established that hearing stories is pleasant (Krashen, 1994). Even if hearing stories were somewhat less efficient than skill-building for vocabulary development, there would still be good reason to prefer it.

References

Coady, J. 1997. L2 vocabulary acquisition: A synthesis of the research. In J. Coady and T. Huckin (Eds.) Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 273-290.

Eller, R., Pappas, C., and Brown, E. 1988. The lexical development of kindergartners: Learning from written context. Journal of Reading Behavior, 20: 5-24.

Krashen, S. 1994. The pleasure hypothesis. In J. Alatis (Ed.) Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. pp. 299-322.

Leung, C., and Pikulski, J. 1990. Incidental learning of word meanings by kindergarten and first-grade children through repeated read aloud events. In J. Zutell and S. McCormick (Eds.) Literacy Theory and Research: Analysis from Multiple Paradigms (pp. 231-240). National Reading Conference.

Paribakht, T. S., and Wesche, M. 1997. Vocabulary enhancement activities and reading for meaning in second language vocabulary acquisition. In J. Coady and T. Huckin (Eds.) Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 174-200.

Robbins, C. and Ehri, L. 1994. Reading storybooks to kindergartners helps them learn new vocabulary words. Journal of Educational Psychology 86(1): 54-64.

Senechal, M., LeFebre, J., Hudson, E. and Lawson, E.P. 1996. "Knowledge of storybooks as a predictor of young children's vocabulary." Journal of Educational Psychology 88(1): 520-536.

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