| Inspired by the Involvement Load Hypothesis put forward by Hulstijn and Laufer, which proposes that task inducing higher involvement load is likely to produce better vocabulary retention effects, the study was mainly aimed to apply the Hypothesis to substantiate incidental vocabulary acquisition in EFL listening comprehension. Besides, the thesis was aimed to explore the correlation between vocabulary size and retention effects in listening environment.Experiments were carried out among three parallel classes of non-English major students by assigning them task with different involvement index of two listening comprehension passages. Scores of immediate and post vocabulary retention tests were collected. Kruskal-Wallis Test was employed to analyze the correlation between retention effects and task involvement load. It turned out that there was significant difference in retention effects among the three tasks, which further proved the Involvement Load Hypothesis, confirming that tasks with higher involvement load lead to better retention effects.Independent- Samples T Test was adopted to analyze the relationship between vocabulary size and effects of vocabulary retention. The results demonstrated that there was a significant difference between vocabulary size and retention effects only in Task B (listening comprehension questions with marginal glosses relevant to the questions), but not in Task A (listening comprehension questions with marginal glosses irrelevant to the questions) and Task C (listening comprehension questions with marginal glosses relevant to the questions + writing).Besides, we conducted a simple questionnaire and a qualitative interview to survey students' attitudes towards vocabulary learning in listening. The results obtained were not in complete accordance with the results demonstrated in experiments.Reasons accounting for these conflicting results are illustrated and the thesis ends with pedagogical implications for teachers and researchers.
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