An Empirical Study Of The Effects Of Output Hypothesis On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

Since Nagy, Herman and Anderson (1985) put forward the concept of “incidentalvocabulary acquisition”, scholars have conducted a variety of empirical studies in thisfield. In China, most of English learners suffer from the phenomenon “scoring high butbeing poor in speaking”, for the reason of which, the study of incidental vocabularyacquisition is conducted under such circumstances.As a by-product of any activity not explicitly geared to lexical acquisition, incidentalvocabulary acquisition (IVA) accounts for a substantial proportion of the vocabularygrowth. Over the last twenty years, there are various studies from home and abroademployed on the impact of second language reading of incidental vocabulary acquisitionin different aspects. Among them, the effects of different reading tasks, vocabulary frequency and topic familiarity on IVA get the most concern. Little attention is paid to theeffects of output enhancement, which appears in the present study as text reconstruction.The present study tries to investigate the effects of output on IVA based on the theory ofoutput hypothesis, Information Processing Model and Involvement Load Hypothesis.Specifically, the study addresses three research questions:1) Do production taskspromote the acquisition of new words? What conditions lead to acquisition of new wordsin production tasks?2) As the acquisition of new words, do learners of production tasksperform better than learners of comprehension tasks?3) What is the difference betweenlearners of production tasks and learners of comprehension tasks towards the new words’retention? These questions were examined in an experimental study. Seventy threefreshmen of non-English majors learning English as a foreign language were involved.They were divided into three groups, with51in control group and48comprehensiongroup respectively,49in production group. There were eight target words in the readingtext, which were appeared in different ways in different groups. In Control Group, thesubjects were asked to read the text; in Comprehension Group, the subjects were requiredto do the true of false questions after reading; in Group Production Group, the subjectswere asked to make the text reconstruction. After that, they would take the immediate testand the delayed test two weeks later. The reading text in these three groups was the same.The experiment consisted of five steps: pilot test, reading comprehension, textreconstruction, immediate vocabulary test and delayed vocabulary test. After the tests,Statistics Package for Social Science (SPSS) would be employed to calculate thedescriptive statistic of all the tests’ results. The descriptive statistics reported the meansand standard deviations on three tests (Pretest, Immediate Test and Delayed Test). ThenOne-way ANOVA was used to examine what on earth the distinction out of the controlgroup, comprehension group and production group is about the retention of the targetitems in the immediate test and delayed test. And the major findings are:(1) Output taskdoes exert positive effects on IVA.(2) Whether the acquisition of new words or theretention of words, students do not perform significantly upon both the production taskand the comprehension task.(3) Compared with the comprehension task, students preferto the production task.(4) The students’ vocabulary level does have an influence on IVA. The subjects with a larger vocabulary size have a more likelihood of acquisition. Based onthe results of the experiment, it also puts forward some pedagogical implications. And stillsome limitations of the present research and suggestions about learning and teaching areraised for the future research.