The Effect of Modern Lyrical Music on Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition

Abstract

In recent studies, vocabulary acquisition has received a high premium as it plays an important role in second language acquisition .Yet in the midst of increasing satisfaction with the field’s maturity, a number of rather fundamental questions remained unanswered. One of the most important questions concerned the effect of music on second language vocabulary acquisition .The aim of this study is to a) investigate the effect of music on second language vocabulary acquisition; b) investigate the effect of music on long term retention of vocabulary. For this purpose sixty girl students of a junior high school were randomly selected and assigned to two groups of thirty .The first group (experimental group) was the music group, the second (control group was the no music group .The effect of treatment on vocabulary acquisition was assessed immediately after the treatment .The research hypotheses was :1)music has no effect on vocabulary acquisition of students in junior high school in Iran 2) music has no effect on long term retention of vocabulary .The analysis of the collected data through applying t-test revealed that there was a significant differences between the two groups. The music group outperformed the no-music group both in short and long term retention .The results show that music has positive effect on vocabulary acquisition .Therefore the null hypotheses was rejected.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n23p2583