The Effects Of Different Reading Tasks On L2 Vocabulary Acquisition

On the basis of the Involvement Load Hypothesis(Laufer & Hulstijn, 2001), an empirical study is made to investigate the effects of different reading tasks with same or different involvement loads on the Chinese non-English majors'L2 vocabulary retention. The study examines how 169 students at an intermediate EFL proficiency level acquire novel English words incidentally through different reading tasks over time. Evidence for vocabulary retention is sought by comparing the acquisition of those unfamiliar words at an immediate vocabulary test and two delayed vocabulary recall tests across three reading tasks. The statistical techniques employed for analyses are descriptive statistics and two-way ANOVA with post hoc test. Through the interpretation of the quantitative results in two experiments, we can generate the following conclusions:1) The results of two experiments partially support the theoretical foundation of our present study ---- the Involvement Load Hypothesis. Task with a higher involvement load yields better retention of target words than that with a lower involvement load and when the involvement load is the same, an output task may produce better retention of investigated words than an input task.2) The knowledge of novel words is maintained differently at three tests. As time elapses, part of students'vocabulary knowledge may be worn down in incidental vocabulary acquisition. Generally speaking, the highest mean scores of all those target words are gained at the immediate test and the lowest mean scores are gained at the post-test 2 across three reading tasks.3) Vocabulary knowledge can be retained longer in tasks with a higher involvement load than in tasks with a lower involvement load. Also an output task can make vocabulary knowledge last longer than an input task when their involvement load is the same.Based on the above conclusions, some pedagogical implications are made in the following:Firstly, it should be made clear to both English teachers and learners that students who are of intermediate English level can also acquire vocabulary knowledge incidentally through reading. Of course, the difficulty of reading passage should be appropriate for those learners.Secondly, as the findings presented in the study, it indicates that tasks with a higher involvement load yield better retention than tasks with a lower involvement...