An Experimental Study Of Task-based L2 Vocabulary Acquisition Through Reading By Chinese Middle School Students

This thesis reports an empirical study on the effects of task factors on the acquisition of L2 vocabulary through reading by 51 Chinese middle school students.To be specific,the present study adopts a pretest-posttest design to address two research questions:1)How does task type affect task-based L2 vocabulary learning? 2) How does task frequency affect task-based L2 vocabulary learning? Based on the reciprocal relations between reading and L2 vocabulary,5 reading-based tasks were devised as the treatment of the experiment,namely reading with gloss plus comprehension questions(RG+C),reading without gloss plus comprehension questions (R+C),reading with gloss plus close(RG+CL),reading with gloss plus sentence making(RG+SM),and reading without gloss plus sentence making(R+SM),and the treatment text is a 449 word-long passage with 12 target words imbedded. Correspondingly,the 51 subjects were divided into five parallel experimental groups (EGs)with each EG exposed to one of the five tasks.The tasks were repeated four times successively.With the revised instrument of the Vocabulary Knowledge Scale (Paribakht & Wesche,1997;Zhou 2007),the acquisition of L2 target words were analyzed quantitatively.Meanwhile,interview was also conducted to get qualitative data.The major results are summarized as follows:1)Task type significantly affects the learning of L2 vocabulary.All the five tasks greatly facilitate Chinese middle school students' L2 vocabulary acquisition, however,the facilitative power of each task varies significantly from one another.The learning pattern does not exactly follow what has been predicted by the Involvement Load Hypothesis(Laufer & Hulstijn,2001),indicating the Hypothesis is only partially supported and problematic theoretically.2)Task frequency also significantly affects Chinese middle-school students' learning of L2 vocabulary.With the increase of task frequency,each EG's learning outcome increases significantly,confirming the enhancing effects of task frequency on task-based L2 vocabulary learning.In addition,task frequency interacts and modifies the effects of task type,but this modifying effect is not powerful enough to get rid of the effects of task type.The results of the study provide insightful suggestions and pedagogical implications for L2 vocabulary learning and teaching in China.