66 CHAPTER 4 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION is study compared receptive skills in learners who had been taught on the basis of two di erent instructional programs: Structure-based (SB) and Dynamic usage-based (DUB) programs. e results showed that, a er six years, DUB and SB learners are similar in reading skills, but DUB students outperform SB students on listening skills with a large e ect size. SB students thus produced similar scores as the DUB students in reading a er six years. We argue that this is due to L2 lexical knowledge and reading exposure. In the rst three years, typical SB programs focus primarily on the acquisition of lexical and grammatical knowledge as building blocks of the L2. In the nal three years, SB teaching programs usually provide a great deal of L2 exposure not only through coursebooks, but also through an additional literature component, frequent reading exam practice, and frequent memorization of explicit L1-L2 word lists. e ndings obtained in our study are very much in line with the literature. Research has shown that reading comprehension is greatly a ected by the amount of lexical knowledge (cf. Hazenberg & Hulstijn, 1996; Laufer, 1992; Laufer & Sim, 1985; Hu & Nation, 2000; Laufer, 1989; Nation, 2006), indicating that without su cient lexical knowledge, other factors will probably fail to meaningfully contribute to comprehension. Although the high degree of L2 exposure in the last three years to prepare for the reading exam aided SB students in obtaining enough lexical knowledge for reading comprehension, it did not facilitate their listening comprehension development. Four aspects may have played a role. First, the programs di ered very much in the amount of L2 oral exposure provided. In a DUB program, maximal target language use in all six years and immersion-like activities with videos through online learning systems at home in the nal three years provided far more input repetition for auditory formmeaning mappings to become entrenched compared to the minimal exposure in their SB-taught peers. Second, although segmentation skills, which are considered to contribute to the development of listening skills, are not explicitly practised in either the SB and the DUB program, the DUB program provided a great amount of exposure to oral French in the rst three years with a great deal of repetition. In the last three years, videos in online learning systems with French subtitles were provided and students invited to read along. e repeated and simultaneous processing of oral and written forms is likely to induce segmentation skills. ird, the need for phonological memory skills is expected to largely depend on the speed of meaning retrieval which, as argued by di erent authors (cf. Pawley & Syder, 1983; Lewis, 1993; Wray & Perkins, 2000; Tang, 2013; Gustafson & Verspoor, 2017) will
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