The Effects Of The Involvement Load In Reading Tasks On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

There are many vocabulary acquisition strategies. It is claimed that learners could acquire a large proportion of vocabulary incidentally from written contexts. It is claimed by the Involvement Load Hypothesis that the effectiveness of incidental vocabulary tasks depends on the factors of need, search, and evaluation. Taken together, these elements form the'involvement load'of a task. It is expected that a task with a higher involvement load is more effective than a task with a lower involvement load. There are many empirical studies to examine the effects of different factors on foreign vocabulary acquisition. These studies have gained some achievements to instruct vocabulary pedagogy. However, the subjects in most domestic studies are English majors, the senior school students and the pupils and they are tested only in a short period. The fact that vocabulary acquisition is a rather slow and complex process has been ignored.This study aims to examine the effect of the involvement load in reading tasks on incidental vocabulary acquisition. An experiment including 105 Chinese non-major English-learners was conducted in Qingdao Agriculture University in Shandong province. They were required to do three frequently-used reading tasks. The following research questions are to be investigated: 1.The correlation between the involvement loads in reading tasks and vocabulary retention? 2. The correlation between the tasks with the same involvement load but different distribution and vocabulary retention? The subjects were given an immediate vocabulary test after the reading task, a post-test one week later and another post-test one month later. SPSS 13.0 is used to analyze the data. The results show that (1) Different reading tasks have an impact on Chinese intermediate English learners in a certain extent. The tasks with higher involvement load are more effective for vocabulary retention than those with lower involvement in a long or short term; (2) Tasks with the same involvement load but different distribution have different effects on vocabulary retention, but they do not have statistically significant difference in a long period. The findings indicates that different reading tasks with different involvement load have a salient effect in a short period but a weak effect in a long term, verifying the involvement load hypothesis to some extent. Based on the findings, some practical and effective pedagogical suggestions on English vocabulary acquisition are put forward.