Study On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

Learning a foreign or second language for intermediate and advanced levels of students involves the acquisition of great amount of words, most of which are to be learned incidentally. Teachers would like to know how instructional programs might be designed to generate optimal incidental vocabulary acquisition. One essential question is what tasks are most effective for vocabulary retention. The current paper aims to provide a partial answer to this question.It firstly introduces the theoretic background of incidental vocabulary acquisition and the Involvement Load Hypothesis (Hulstijn & Laufer, 2001). The Involvement load is a construct that describes the motivational and cognitive dimensions of a task, specifically as it affects the processing of individual words. It is based on the belief that deeper and more elaborate processing of words will increase retention. The empirical study in the thesis adopted the involvement index, proposed by Hulstijn & Laufer, to explore the effectiveness of different learning tasks on incidental vocabulary acquisition.The subjects consisted of two classes of non-English majors. In the first experiment 40 students were assigned three tasks with different involvement loads respectively (reading, reading plus filling-in and writing). They were not informed of any posttests on the target words and spent 16, 23 and 30 minutes finishing their assigned task respectively. In the second experiment 30 students were assigned the same tasks but the time to finish them was controlled at 35 minutes. After the tasks, students received an immediate posttest on the target words and a week later a delayed posttest with the order of the target words changed randomly.The analysis and comparison of the results show that learning tasks with higher involvement load (writing) are generally more effective for incidental vocabulary...