Along the same lines, Chien and Kao (2002) found that students believed an increased L2 vocabulary would improve listening comprehension. Since the limited vocabulary possessed by students presents obstacles to their successful comprehension of spoken English, we should assess the effectiveness of lexical intervention on their listening performance.
Furthermore, an examination of the effectiveness of multi-faceted lexical instruction should be undertaken due to the fact that existing literature on the subject presents inconsistent findings. Some offered much acclaim to its value (Chung & Huang, 1998; Kang, 2009), whereas others cast doubt upon its effectiveness (Chang & Read, 2006; Chang, 2007). For example, Kang’s (2009) study demonstrated the facilitative effects of vocabulary pre-teaching on junior-high school students’ listening comprehension. On the other hand, research has revealed some negative results—for instance, 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.