| L2vocabulary acquisition has been attached great importance in the field ofsecond language acquisition. It is widely believed that most vocabulary are acquiredin an incidental fashion in L1as well as in L2, as the by-product of reading andlistening activities not explicitly geared to vocabulary learning acquisition. Researchshowed that reading tasks can effeciently promote vocabulary acquisition, and thedifferent reading tasks can be classified in terms of their vocabulary retentioneffectiveness. Laufer and Hulstijn proposed Involvement Load Hypothesis in2001and made the task-induced involvement load as the standard of evaluating readingtasks’ effects of vocabulary acquisition.The present study aims to investigate the effects of the three components ofInvolvement Load Hypothesis, and the different vocabulary retention effects of tasktypes. The subjects in the study are Chinese intermediate English as ForeignLanguage (EFL) learners from Xi’an Peihua University. They were randomly dividedinto five groups and were given five different tasks about the reading passage. Thenthey were required to write down the corresponding Chinese meanings for the targetwords. One week later, they were given the same tests. The research results wereanalyzed with SPSS.17.0. The results show that higher involvement load tasksoutperform lower ones. And the component of evaluation plays the most positive rolein incidental vocabulary acquisition among the three components. Besides, with thesame involvement loads, output tasks have significantly better effects in vocabularyacquisition than input tasks in immediate test period. But the effects are notsignificant in delayed test.The research has provided some suggestive implications for L2vocabularyacquisition, for instance, designing reading tasks of different involvement loads anddesigning output tasks for EFL learners to promote vocabulary acquisition. |
PDF Full Text Request