An Empirical Study Of Incidental Vocabulary Learning By College English Learners

The issues concerning vocabulary acquisition have been studied for many years.However, the issue how vocabulary can be best taught or how learners can best learn itneeds further study.Teachers have made many attempts to figure out ways of instruction that might fosterthe acquisition of words, e.g., the audio-visual method, context teaching, etc. Thoseefforts made by teachers proved effective to varying degrees. But it is to be admitted thatteaching vocabulary only in class is not enough. A large number of words are actuallylearned unconsciously out of class.The concept of incidental vocabulary acquisition is put forward by Nagy, Hermanand Anderson (1985), who hold that learners incidentally acquire words through reading.Some researchers begin to explore instructional interventions such as task-inducedinvolvement and glosses in order to promote incidental vocabulary acquisition throughreading. Based on the concept of incidental L2vocabulary learning, Laufer and Hulstijn(2001) construct the Involvement Load Hypothesis as a way to analyze EFL students’word retention. The theory explains vocabulary acquisition from the perspective ofcognitive psychology and measures studying task effectiveness in terms of threecomponents of a task: need, search and evaluation. The Involvement Load Hypothesis issome inspirations for the study of vocabulary learning and teaching. Many empiricalstudies have been conducted to see whether the hypothesis holds truth under differenttasks (e.g., Huang,2007; Laufer&Hulstijn,2001, etc.), although the results so far arerather inconclusive.However, only quite a few studies are designed to consider both the external andinternal factors of learners. So with the consideration of the learners’ vocabulary size andvocabulary learning strategies, we will investigate the incidental vocabulary learningretention. The subjects of the study are three parallel classes of non-English majorsophomores in Hexi University, which locates in Zhangye City of Western Gansu. Andwe will answer the following questions:(1) Do the tasks with higher involvement load produce better results than those withlower involvement load?(2) Whether tasks with same involvement load yield same learning outcomes?(3) Do the vocabulary size and vocabulary learning strategies have an influence onincidental vocabulary retention? If so, what are they? After the data analysis, the following conclusions are drawn:(1) Tasks with higher involvement load do yield better learning outcomes than lowerones in both the immediate post-test and the delayed post-test. But different tasks with thesame involvement load don’t yield similar outcomes. The results partly support theInvolvement Load Hypothesis.(2) The students with bigger vocabulary size have a better retention than the othergroup but the results are also influenced by the question types. And the subjects’ habitualvocabulary learning strategies had no significant influence on the vocabulary retention.