Vocabulary Acquisition through Storytelling
Presented at PAC5, Vladivostok, Russia, June, 2004
TexTESOL III Newsletter. February, 3-5. 2005
Beniko Mason

Introduction

It has been demonstrated that vocabulary acquisition is possible from listening to stories⁽¹⁾, but it has also been argued that this source of vocabulary is insufficient and inefficient, that students need direct instruction as well⁽²⁾. In this study, I attempt to confirm that listening to stories leads to the acquisition of vocabulary, and also attempt to determine how efficient this acquisition is, that is, how it compares to direct instruction.

Experiment 1: Story-telling vs. List-learning

The 60 participants (n = 27, n = 33) were first year English majors at a four- year-private college in Osaka, Japan. All students participated in both treatments.

In the storytelling treatment, participants first took a pretest on 30 words (write a definition in Japanese). They then listened to a story, "The North Wind and Sun," that contained the 30 words. The words on the sheet were written on the blackboard in front of the class. While the teacher told the story she pointed to the words on the board so that students could tell which word was used to tell the story. The participants occasionally 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. The story took about 20 minutes.

After listening to the story, the participants retook the vocabulary test. A week later, students took an unexpected follow-up test on the same words presented in a different order.

The second treatment was given a week later immediately after the same participants took the follow-up test for the storytelling method. Subjects were tested on a different list of 30 words. They were given the Japanese definitions of the words and were told to try to learn the words in the next 20 minutes, using any techniques they wanted to use. Students were allowed to work together. Subjects then took a posttest and a follow-up post-test one week later, which may or may not have been unexpected.

As shown in table 1, the List method was very successful immediately after learning. The mean score of the list method immediately after list learning was 28.5 out of 30, while the mean score of the story method was 17.2 out of 30. The results of the follow-up test showed a large drop in retention for list-learning with much less of a drop for words acquired from story-telling. Sixty three percent of the list-learned words that were learned were forgotten on the follow-up (26.1 words unknown, 24.6 learned, 15.7 forgotten), but only 25% of the words acquired via story-telling were forgotten on the follow-up test (21.7 words unknown, 17.2 acquired, 2.2 forgotten).

These results were confirmed by an Analysis of Covariance. The adjusted means for the follow-up post-test were not significantly different (list-learning = 14.6, story-telling = 13.2; F = 1.5, p = .23).

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