An Empirical Study Of Task Involvement Loads In Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

It has been widely acknowledged that vocabulary plays a prominent role in foreignlanguage learning. Furthermore, currently more attention has been paid to the issue ofvocabulary acquisition in second language pedagogy and research. Many learners andresearchers found that incidental vocabulary learning is an effective way of acquiringvocabulary.There are many researches on incidental vocabulary learning, and various effectivefactors on incidental vocabulary learning have been found. Laufer and Hustijin proposed theInvolvement Load Hypothesis in2001. The Task Involvement Component Model consists ofthree components facilitating vocabulary acquisition, need, search and evaluation. Laufer andHustijin’s model is affective and cognitive. Based on enormous empirical researches andLaufer and Hulstijin’s model, this study proposes another two components to the cognitivecategory that are supposed to exert significant effectiveness to the L2vocabulary acquisition:inferencing and generation. In order to investigate the effect of the proposed components onvocabulary acquisition in an incidental learning situation, the present study proposes threeresearch hypotheses as follow:Hypothesis1: Inferencing significantly promotes vocabulary acquisition.Hypothesis2: Generation significantly promotes vocabulary acquisition.Hypothesis3: The effectiveness produced by generation on vocabulary acquisition ismore significant than by inferencing.Three different tasks are designed and conducted to test the above three hypotheses. Task1involves the minimal inferencing (reading comprehension with marginal glosses); task2induces the maximal inferencing (reading comprehension without marginal glosses); task3induces generation (writing original sentences using the target words). Participants are threeintact parallel classes in Ocean College of Hebei Agricultural University, containing30,31and30respectively. The three tasks are randomly assigned to the three classes during normalclass time. After completing the tasks, the participants are unexpectedly given an immediatepost-test which includes the receptive vocabulary knowledge and productive vocabularyknowledge. And they are given another unexpected delayed post-test one week later. All the data are analyzed through SPSS16.0.The results of the experiment and the statistical analyses are consistent with thehypotheses of the study. Both inferencing and generation have a positive effect on vocabularyacquisition and the effect of generation is more significant than that of inferencing. Withempirical support of this study, a New Task Involvement Loads Model is established whichconsists of five components: need, search, evaluation, inferencing and generation. The newmodel is believed to be conductive to vocabulary acquisition and can be used to analyzedifferent tasks and compare their relative effects on incidental vocabulary acquisition.The present study has both theoretical and pedagogical implications for L2vocabularyacquisition. Due to limitations of time and other conditions, this study has some limitations.However, this present study establishes theoretical constructs for further research, andprovides suggestions for design of vocabulary teaching.