A Study On Incidental Productive Vocabulary Acquisition In Reading Based On The Involvement Load Hypothesis

There is no doubt that vocabulary knowledge is very important in language learning, and it has aroused many foreign language teachers and researchers'great interest. Many linguists believe that a large amount of vocabulary is acquired through incidental learning. During recent decades, incidental vocabulary learning is considered as a new trend that has turned up in the field of applied linguistics. Research at home and abroad has been conducted to examine several factors that may influence incidental acquisition during L2 reading. Whereas incidental learning can enhance vocabulary acquisition to a certain degree, how can vocabulary be acquired and what kind of reading task can facilitate this acquisition more effectively, and so on. These should be explored further.In 2001, Laufer and Hulstijn proposed the Involvement Load Hypothesis for second language vocabulary learning, which claimed that vocabulary gains and retention would be higher with higher task involvement load. The hypothesis was explained from the view of psychological cognition, such as "need", "search" and "evaluation". To provide an empirical testing, the present study carried out an experiment based on the Involvement Load Hypothesis to examine whether different task involvements is positively correlated with the retention scores of the target lexical items, as defined by this hypothesis. It is expected to find out whether tasks with a higher involvement load are more effective for vocabulary retention than tasks with lower involvement load, and whether long-term retention of the target words will be affected by different tasks and whether different types of tasks with the same involvement load have the same effect on vocabulary retention.The subjects in current study are 90 non-English major learners of Grade Two from Shenyang Normal University, who were divided into three groups. Each group with 30 subjects was given one task. Group 1:reading comprehension task; Group 2: reading and guessing words task; Group 3:reading and production task. Their involvement indexes are 1,3,3 respectively. Task 2 and Task 3 are the tasks with the same involvement load:they are input task and output task respectively. There were an immediate posttest and a delayed posttest performed one week later. Delayed posttest was the same as the immediate one except for the different order of the same target words. After the experiment, the data is analyzed by SPSS.The results have shown that:learners could acquire the productive vocabulary knowledge incidentally by performing reading tasks with different involvement loads, but the attrition of productive vocabulary knowledge was great in delayed test one week later; the tasks with different involvement loads have different effects on the vocabulary acquisition, even the tasks with the same involvement load but belonging to different types of tasks also have different effects on the vocabulary acquisition: Group 3 and Group 2 that performed the task with higher involvement load had the better retention of productive vocabulary; Group 1 that performed the task with the lowest involvement load had the worst retention of productive vocabulary; for Group 2 (input task) and Group 3 (output task) that performed the tasks with the same involvement load (input task and output task), Group 3 that performed the output task had better productive vocabulary retention than Group 2 that performed the input task. Therefore this has also shown that among components of involvement load hypothesis "evaluation" plays a more important role in retention of vocabulary than "search".The findings of the present study not only provide generally positive support for the involvement load hypothesis, but also provide specific method for foreign or second language educator in vocabulary teaching. That is to say, vocabulary is processed elaborately in the domain of incidental vocabulary acquisition, to help learners to learn those more important and difficult words. In addition, autonomous learners can use the pedagogy to guide themselves to learn new words, and learners process unfamiliar words deeply in listening, speaking, reading and writing cognition activities during foreign language learning to make up for shortcomings in traditional vocabulary learning.