Chang and Read (2006) determined that vocabulary instruction prior to a listening comprehension test had no significant effect on the performance of college students. More intriguingly, those students were both psychologically and affectively reliant on such pre-listening support at the same time that they felt it had little effectiveness in terms of improving their comprehension (Chung, 2002; Chang & Read, 2006). This ambivalence deserves further exploration. Not only must we scrutinize possible problems previous research designs may have had in terms of the methods of teaching vocabulary they utilized, but we should also overcome the limitations of previous studies and modify them with theory-based alternatives.