The Effects Of Pose-reading Task Types And Involvement Load On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Of Senior High School Students In Reading Instrucion

Vocabulary is an essential part of language and is crucial to the learning of English in senior high school.For most senior high school students,vocabulary is often learned intentionally,but this approach lacks authentic context and makes vocabulary acquisition dull and ineffective.However,if post-reading tasks can be designed appropriately for vocabulary in reading,not only can students develop their reading skills,but they can also effectively facilitate the acquisition of vocabulary incidentally.As research on incidental vocabulary acquisition（IVA）has intensified,researchers have found that the task types and involvement load of post-reading tasks are key factors affecting the effectiveness of incidental vocabulary acquisition,but further research is needed to determine what exact effect they have.In view of this,this study designed four post-reading tasks（true-false,meaning-match,gap-filling,and sentence-making）based on the "involvement load hypothesis","output hypothesis" and "input hypothesis" to investigate the effects of involvement load（low,high）and task types（receptive,productive）on high school students’ IVA.The specific research questions are as follows:（1）How does task involvement load affect the immediate incidental vocabulary acquisition and delayed retention in high school students?（2）How do task types affect the immediate incidental vocabulary acquisition and delayed retention in high school students?（3）How do task involvement load and task types have interaction effects on the immediate incidental vocabulary acquisition and delayed retention?To answer the above questions,a total of 162 high school students in four parallel classes of Grade 1 in Suzhou were selected as the subjects of this study,and eight words from extracurricular texts were chosen as the target words.The teaching experiment was conducted over a four-week period,with tasks randomly assigned to four classes,where one class was given reading instruction each week.Prior to the formal teaching experiment,a one-way ANOVA was conducted on the most recent English test scores of the four classes to determine the homogeneity of English proficiency among the four classes.Afterward,the vocabulary of the students in the four classes was tested to ensure that the participants had a vocabulary of more than 2000,which was a prerequisite for incidental acquisition.During the teaching experiment,the four classes were given the same reading text but different tasks,and an immediate posttest was given right after completing the task within the allotted time.In order to simulate the conditions of incidental vocabulary acquisition in English reading class as authentically as possible,the teacher conducted a reading instruction on the material after the immediate test but does not deliberately mention the specific meaning of the target words.A week later,a delayed posttest was given.The results showed that:（1）The main effect of involvement load was significant only in the immediate posttest,indicating that tasks with higher involvement load are more effective in promoting immediate IVA.However,the main effect was not significant in the delayed posttest because time would weaken the power of the involvement load.This experiment only partially supports the "involvement load hypothesis".（2）The main effect of task types was significant in both immediate and delayed posttests.Compared to the receptive task,the productive task is more effective in facilitating not only immediate IVA,but also its delayed retention.This result fully supports the output hypothesis.（3）In the posttest of IVA,an interaction between involvement load and task types emerged.After one week,the retention capacity of the meaning-match task was similar to that of the true-false task,while the retention capacity of the sentence-making task was significantly better than that of the gap-filling task.Some implications are provided for the IVA in high school English teaching based on the findings:firstly,when assigning post-reading tasks,teachers should design productive tasks with a higher involvement load,such as the sentence-making task.Such tasks not only help students to acquire more vocabulary incidentally while reading,but also retain more information about the vocabulary for a longer period of time.Secondly,teachers need to intentionally repeat the vocabulary after the tasks to slow down the pace at which students forget these vocabularies.