An Experimental Study Of The Effects Of Involvement Amounton The L2 Indirect Vocabulary Acquisition

Although indirect learning has been found to enhance lexical acquisition, the process by which indirect vocabulary acquisition occurs is slow, and there is no way to predict which words will be learned, when, nor to what degree. The Involvement Amount Hypothesis constructed by Laofer and Hulstjn (2001) has gone some way towards handling these problems. The authors hypothesized that the word retention was conditional upon the amount of involvement while processing these words, that is to say, the greater the involvement, the more effective the learning is, which puts the"level of processtheory"into practice.To test and enrich the hypothesis, 112 non-English freshmen from three parallel classes in South University of Technology were assigned three commonly-used reading-based tasks, which are different in amount of involvement in terms of word processing. To modify the hypothesis, the effect of exposure frequency on incidental vocabulary learning is also investigated through two target words with quite different amount of exposure.Results indicate that: 1) Tasks with higher involvement, in general, lead to better words retention than that of low involvement; 2) The weight of evaluating component is greater than search component on word knowledge retention; 3)The exposure frequency of the word plays an important and intricate role in vocabulary retention. When the amount of exposure reaches a certain degree, the effect it brings is even greater than that of higher involvement on words with single exposure.Based on the above conclusions, some pedagogical implications are made as follows. The study proves that tasks with higher involvement lead to better word retention than tasks with lower one and it offers our language teachers with some reasonable criteria to operationalize the elaboration or processing depth when we indirectly learn the words in some reading-based tasks. Language teachers can design after-reading tasks to direct learners'attention to the new words and process them with different degrees of involvement. Moreover, because of the memory leakage as time passes by, teachers should find ways to ensure the reoccurrence of the L2 words so that learners can have better retention of the target words.