Innovation in Language Learning

Lexical competence is a pivotal component of communicative competence and provides much of the basis for how well learners speak a foreign language. There is consensus that incidental vocabulary acquisition occurs largely as a by-product of extensive  reading and listening out of the borders of the pedagogical focus after learners acquire their first thousand words intentionally in the classroom. It is also assumed that the increasing familiarity of learners with many forms of information technology devices may play a significant role in contributing to enriching their word repertoire. The TED application can function as a great source of audiovisual language input exposing learners to new words in interesting, exciting, and authentic contexts. However, an L2 environment can appear ambiguous to some learners since the lexical, grammatical, culrural, and phonological cues existing there may be unfamiliar to them. Accordingly, learners with moderate ambiguity tolerance (AT) levels function better and presist in language learning more than those with lower AT levels. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the relationship between ambiguity tolerance and incidental L2 vocabulary acquisition using the TED application. The participants of this study consist of 60 advanced EFL adult learners whose AT levels have been measured at the outset of the study by means of a questionnaire. They are exposed to several new words through four TED-Talks videos over a 16-session treatment period. After watching each video, the participants discuss some questions related to the topic of the presented talk. Afterwards, they receive the related transcript and are assigned to present some talks based on their overall understanding of its content during the upcoming sessions. After two or three presentation sessions for each video, a posttest is administered to measure the students’ acquisition of the new words included in the target video. The AT questionnaire will also be given to the students at the end of the treatment in order to check the potential changes in their amibiguity tolerance in L2 learning situations. Since this is an ongoing experiment, the results will be known at the end of the data collection and data analyis processes.