The Effects Of The Input Task And The Output Task On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

Vocabulary teaching plays an important role in second language teaching. There are two ways of vocabulary acquisition, direct and indirect. The incidental vocabulary acquisition belongs to the second one, indirect acquisition. The researcher find that different tasks have different effects on the incidental vocabulary acquisition. Hulstijn and Laufer(2001) proposed their construct of "task-induced involvement" and the "involvement load hypothesis" to measure different tasks. Their construct assumes that tasks with the same involvement index will have same effects on the incidental vocabulary acquisition whether the tasks are input tasks or output tasks. This study is based on the "involvement load hypothesis" and proposes an empirical experiment which compares the different effects of an input task and an output task on the Chinese vocabulary acquisition (the subjects are foreign students who study Chinese as a second language). The results of the experiment supports the "involvement load hypothesis" on most part, showing there is no significant difference on the incidental Chinese vocabulary acquisition between the group completing the input task and the other completing the output task. According to the results of the experiment, we take a close look into the three factors in the "involvement load hypothesis" and discuss the other learner factors closely related to the "involvement load hypothesis". This study also finds that the Chinese characters and the Chinese word-forming influence the incidental Chinese vocabulary acquisition. I hope this study should be helpful in the field of teaching Chinese as a second language.