The Effects Of Task-Induced Involvement And Task Type On Chinese English Majors’ L2Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

Incidental L2vocabulary acquisition happens when learners are engaged in otherlearning activities, in which condition they do not focus their attention on memorizingnew words but acquire some words incidentally. Incidental vocabulary acquisition isan important way of learning vocabulary, so researches in this field are of great valuefor L2learners and play a significant role in L2vocabulary pedagogy.This study, which is mainly based on Involvement Load Hypothesis, intends tofind out the influence of task-induced involvement and task type on incidental L2vocabulary acquisition of Chinese English majors. The aim of this study is toinvestigate whether involvement load is the determining factor to affect incidentalvocabulary acquisition, irrespective of task type.The participants in this study were freshmen enrolled in four intact classes offirst-semester English major in School of English Studies at Xi’an InternationalStudies University (n=113). After reading the text, each intact class was required toaccomplish one particular task matched with the target text: Multiple-choice, Fill-inblank, Meaning-match and Free-writing. And an immediate posttest was administeredto test recall of15target words after the participants completed the tasks.The data collected in this experiment are analyzed by SPSS17.0. Thenconclusions are drawn as follows:1）Task-induced involvement is not the determining factor which affects theincidental vocabulary acquisition. And high involvement load index does not surelycause good results on posttests.2）Task type can affect incidental vocabulary acquisition to some degree andoutput-oriented task is more conductive to incidental vocabulary acquisition thaninput-oriented task.