Although morphological awareness has been shown to facilitate L2 vocabulary learning, it remains unclear whether pre-listening morphological intervention (PLMI) can effectively enhance the acquisition and retention of aural vocabulary among senior high school EFL learners, and how learners' existing vocabulary knowledge may modulate these effects. The present study therefore examines the impact of PLMI on Chinese senior high school EFL learners' learning and retention of aural multimorphemic words. Three conditions were compared: PLMI, pre-listening word meaning explanations (PLWME), and listening-only (LO). A total of 156 students from a Chinese senior high school were assigned to three intact classes. Aural vocabulary learning was measured through immediate and delayed posttests. ANCOVA results showed that the PLMI group significantly outperformed both the PLWME and LO groups in both tests, indicating that focusing learners' attention on morphological structures before listening facilitates more effective learning and long-term retention. The study also examined the role of learners' prior vocabulary knowledge. Further analyses showed that learners' pre-existing vocabulary proficiency did not interact with instructional condition, suggesting that the benefits of PLMI were consistent across different vocabulary levels. These findings confirm the superiority of PLMI and highlight its pedagogical value for enhancing vocabulary learning in secondary school English listening instruction.
Chen et al. (Thu,) studied this question.