3.5.2 listening tasks
    the study involved two listening tasks, each of which consisted of a listening text followed by an information transfer task.
    (a) listening texts
    two listening texts, a report of a sales manager and a dialogue on a conference registration, each approximately 450 words long, were written for the two listening tasks. redundancy was purposefully involved in the text construction to achieve sufficient information exposure to the participants. the listening texts were read and recorded by two native english speakers who were efl teachers in the university where the pilot study was carried out.
    (b) information transfer tasks
    similar to the design of ellis (2003), two information-transfer tasks, i. e., using information in a text to complete a chart or table, were presented after the listening texts to check the participants' comprehension of the texts. the two tasks were: drawing a sales line on a company's yearly sales chart and completing a registration form. the highest possible score for each task was five marks. the participants got one mark for each correct answer on the chart or the form.
    (c) vocabulary items
    each of the two listening texts contained five target words for the investigation of incidental vocabulary acquisition, and thus there were ten target words in total. these words were of relatively low frequency and each occurred twice in the same text. the target words were selected on the basis that they were unlikely to be known by the majority of the participants. according to cobb's (2005) word list, five of the ten words were beyond the 2000 level and the academic word list (awl) ; four words were in the awl; and only one word belonged to the 1000-2000 level.