The Effect Of Task-induced Involvement And Task Type On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition By Chinese Non-English Majors

Laufer and Hulstijn (2001) proposed a motivational-cognitive construct of task-induced involvement to account for variation in effectiveness among different vocabulary learning tasks. The Involvement Load Hypothesis states that word learning and retention are contingent upon a task's involvement load (i.e. the amount of need, search and evaluation it imposes).The present study consists of two experiments investigating the task-induced involvement on incidental vocabulary learning by Chinese non-English majors. Experiment 1 aims to examine whether retention of vocabulary acquired incidentally is contingent upon the amount of task-induced involvement load. Experiment 2 investigates whether two tasks hypothesized to represent the same level of task-induced involvement would yield equivalent initial learning and retention of target words.In the first experiment three intact classes of 120 non-English majors from Gansu Political Science and Law Institute were randomly assigned to perform one of the three learning tasks (reading comprehension, reading comprehension plus fill-in, and sentence writing with the target words) with varying in involvement load. Two classes of 80 participants took part in the second experiment consisting of two tasks (one was an input task and the other was an output task) with the identical involvement load. Short and long-tem retention of the unfamiliar words was investigated in two (immediate and delayed) posttests at an interval of one week.The major findings yielded from this study are summarized as follows:1)The results of Experiment 1 shows that a higher level of learner involvement during the task promotes more effective initial vocabulary learning and better retention of the new words.2)The findings of Experiment 2 indicates that when different tasks have the same involvement load, the output task results in better amounts of initial vocabulary learning and retention of new words, which demonstrates that the claim that the effectiveness of a task has nothing to do with whether it is an input or an output should be rejected.Based on the findings from the research, the study offers some theoretical and pedagogical implications for vocabulary learning and teaching. It provides some evidence for the Involvement Load Hypothesis. The results indicate that learners could incidentally acquire a certain number of words through different tasks. Tasks varying in involvement load for different words, depending on the type of reinforcement, can be designed to promote vocabulary learning. Teachers can encourage their students to perform output tasks since they can lead to better retention results, such as sentence writing or composition writing.