The Effects Of Various Task Involvement Loads On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition For English Learners

The importance of vocabulary knowledge in learning language has aroused the great interest of many foreign language teachers and researchers. Many linguists believe that a large proportion of vocabulary is acquired in an incidental way. During the recent decades, incidental vocabulary learning is considered as a new trend that has turned up in the field of applied linguistics. Research at home and abroad has been conducted to examine several factors that may influence incidental acquisition during L2 reading. Whereas incidental learning can enhance vocabulary acquisition in a certain degree, what degree can vocabulary be acquired and what kind of reading can facilitate this acquisition more effectively, and so forth. In 2001, Laufer and Hulstijn proposed the Involvement Load Hypothesis for second language vocabulary learning, which claimed that vocabulary gains and retention would be higher with a greater level of task involvement load. The hypothesis was explained from the view of psychological cognition, such as need, search and evaluation. To provide an empirical testing, the present study carried out an experiment based on the Involvement Load Hypothesis to examine whether various task involvements is positively correlated with the retention scores of the target lexical items, as defined by this hypothesis. It is expected to find out whether tasks with higher involvement load are more effective for vocabulary retention than tasks with lower involvement load, and whether long-term retention of the target words will be affected by various tasks and whether word-focused tasks activities are more effective for retention than reading alone. Ninety-six subjects are selected from three classes of English majors in Grade one in JingDezhen Ceramic Institute. Each class is assigned to one of the three tasks which contained various involvement components: a reading comprehension with marginal glosses task, a reading comprehension plus "fill in" task (words glossed), and a sentence-writing task (word glossed). Then the retention of ten target words is assessed by an immediate test and a delayed test. The data is analyzed by SPSS. The results have shown that 1) under the various task involvement condition, English learners could acquire and retain unfamiliar words through reading, and the retention scores of ten target words is highest in task 3; lower in task 2 and lowest in task 1 in immediate test. 2) In the delayed test, the retention scores are much lower than immdiate test, but each group has got word retention, especially in group 3, so long-term retention of words can be affected by various task involvements. 3) word-focused activities in task 3 retain target words better than reading alone in task 1. These results suggest that further research is expected to explore the hypothesis from a much greater and broader scope.