The Effects Of Task Types And Involvement Load On Students’ English Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition In Junior High School

Research on incidental vocabulary acquisition based on the Involvement Load Hypothesis has been widely used.Previous research has focused on the effects of receptive tasks on incidental vocabulary acquisition.However,little research has been conducted on the combination of involvement load,receptive and productive task types.Therefore,the present study aimed to explore the following three questions: What are the effects of receptive and productive task types on incidental vocabulary acquisition? What are the effects of high and low involvement load on incidental vocabulary acquisition? Is there any significant interative effect of task types and task involvement load on incidental vocabulary acquisition?This study selected 125 students from Xi ’an Gaoxin Yicuiyuan Junior Middle School as research objects and divided them into 5 groups with 25 students in each group,including four experimental groups and one control group.There was no significant difference in the English level of students in each group after testing.First,all participants had to finish reading an article named Beauty in Common Things,then complete the following four exercises with different amounts of involvement load and task types(reading comprehensive questions with dictionary,choose one from two meaning,translation,sentences making).After that,immediate post-test was conducted for the subjects,and delayed post-test was conducted one week later.In order to reduce the impact of the immediate post-test on the delayed post-test,the words in the two tests were the same but in different order.In addition,after each test,2 subjects were randomly selected from each group for interview,as the supplementary data of the experiment.All data were analyzed by using SPSS 25.0.The following conclusions were obtained by independent sample T-test,One-way ANOVA and Two-way ANOVA :Firstly,incidental vocabulary acquisition of productive tasks is better than that of receptive tasks with the same involvement load.This shows that the involvement load is not the only factor affecting the incidental vocabulary acquisition,the type of task also affects the incidental vocabulary acquisition,and the task that requires students to produce content is more conducive to the incidental vocabulary acquisition.Secondly,when the type of task is the same,the task with high involvement load can better promote the incidental vocabulary acquisition than the task with low involvement load.This fully supports the Involvement Load Hypothesis that when other factors are equal,the higher the involvement load is,the better the incidental vocabulary acquisition will be.Finally,there was a significantly influential interaction between task type and involvement load in the immediate post-test of incidental vocabulary acquisition,but no significant interaction in the delayed post-test.This study verifies the influence of the Involvement Load Hypothesis on vocabulary learning.Therefore,teachers should consciously arrange students to practice more tasks with high involvement load index in teaching,and focus more on productive tasks in daily learning.In addition,according to the results of delayed post-test,it is suggested that teachers should give timely consolidation and review after the teaching.