An Empirical Study Of The Vocational College Students' Chunk Acquisition Based On Involvement Load Hypothesis

Lexical trunk acquisition is currently receiving more attention in the second language pedagogy and research; however, most of the researches are focused on full-time undergraduate students and middle school students as their target subjects, with vocational college students ignored. In light of their little interest and weak foundation in English language, more extensive research has to be done in order to improve the effects of vocational college students'lexical chunk acquisition and to promote vocational colleges'English teaching performance.In 2001, Laufer and Hulstijn put forward the Involvement Load Hypothesis, which provided us with criteria to observe, to manipulate and to measure learning task's effectiveness using three elements: need, search and evaluation. Based on the Involvement Load Hypothesis and the specific learning features of vocational college students, this study attempts to tackle the following three questions:1) Will different involvement loads in English chunk learning tasks have different effects on the vocational college students'chunk acquisition?2) Will the amount of involvement load be in proportion to the effects of vocational college students'English chunk acquisition? 3) How do the different elements,"need","search", and"evaluation", influence the vocational college students'short-term, long-term memory and their lexical trunk learning strategies?The research is conducted empirically by taking 180 vocational college students from Shandong Zibo Vocational Institute as study subjects, who had parallel English levels revealed by the pre-testing result. The 180 were divided into six groups, each of them given a different task with a certain involvement load different from the others'. Each group was allowed to consult dictionaries or other referential materials when doing the tasks within a given time. Upon task's completion, the author held an immediate post-testing in an allusion to the target words and carried out a questionnaire about the lexical trunk learning strategies used in the task-doing process in order to investigate whether the different tasks will affect the learners'learning strategies. One week later, the author held a post test. Finally, SPSS was used to analyze statistics from the data collected in experiment.The study obtained the following conclusions from the analysis:1) Tasks with varying involvement loads had different effects and influence on vocational college learner's chunk acquisition. The six groups with different involvement loads got different scores in their post tests.2) The amount of involvement load was in proportion to the effects of vocational college students'English chunk acquisition. With other factors equal, vocational students who did higher involvement load tasks performed better in lexical trunk acquisition test than those who did the tasks with lower involvement loads.3) Even though all the three components of the involvement load had positive effects on memory, the"evaluation"was more effective on vocational students'both short-term and long-term memory than the other two elements. In addition, different tasks with different involvement loads do affect the learners'lexical trunk learning strategies.To some extent, the study may provide some enlightenment to the vocational college English lexical trunk teaching. During the teaching process, teachers should design the tasks with different involvement loads in accordance with the learners'actual situation, guided by the syllabus'requirements for different target words; and encourage students to adopt more output tasks to promote the chunk acquisition effects. At the same time, teachers need to inspire students using the guessing strategy and dictionary consulting strategy so as to strengthen their chunk acquisition consciousness and to improve the teaching effects as well.