The Effect Of Tasks With Different Involvement Loads On Chinese EFL Students' Incidental Vocabulary Learning

Many EFL learners feel concerned with the burden of vocabulary learning and worry about how to tackle the formidable task of learning many thousands of words. As direct vocabulary instruction clearly fails to account for the substantial vocabulary knowledge of intermediate and advanced learners, there has been a broad acceptance of the view among researchers as well as practitioners that a large proportion of L2 vocabulary could be acquired incidentally from written contexts by learners. However, it is not clear if, or to what extent, different L2 learning tasks have different impact on incidental vocabulary learning, and whether reading is really effective in vocabulary learning. The present study aimed to examine whether retention of vocabulary acquired incidentally is contingent upon the amount of task-induced involvement load, a construct proposed by B.Laufer & J.H. Hulstijn (2001) in the Involvement Load Hypothesis. Furthermore the study discussed the efficiency of reading in vocabulary learning by comparing the vocabulary retention of reading with that of word-focused activities. To be brief, the present study aimed to examine the following two questions:1.Are tasks with a higher involvement load more effective for vocabulary retention than tasks with a lower involvement load?2.Are word-focused activities more effective for vocabulary retention than reading alone?The experiment in the present study includes three parallel groups, three tasks and two posttests. The subjects were 90 first year English major students in three intact parallel classes from Shaanxi Normal University, each class with 30 students. Three tasks were reading, sentence writing and fill in sentence. They were assigned to three classes randomly. Two posttests were the immediate test on target words after the subjects finish...