Effects Of Text-based Tasks With Varying Involvement Loads On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

Holding together pronunciation and grammar, vocabulary is both the basic material of language and the foundation or backbone of listening, speaking, reading and writing. So English teachers tend to spend lots of time and energy on how to efficiently improve learners’ vocabulary level, but the results are not ideal. Fortunately, the Communicative Language Approach springing up in1980s found that students can acquire vocabularies while finishing tasks, which raised the related studies on Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition. What’s more, the literature statistics on vocabulary acquisition show that a large number of studies on incidental vocabulary acquisition are related to text-based tasks, and indicate that text-based tasks play a significant role in vocabulary memory. In order to find out the most efficient way of vocabulary acquisition, this study, on the foundation of New Task Involvement Loads Model, designed four text-based tasks with the aim to answer following questions:(a) Arc there any differences between text-based tasks and vocabulary acquisition?(b) Which task is the most efficient way to acquire vocabulary among those four designed tasks?(c) Can this New Task Involvement Loads Model completed by He Jing corroborate its hypothesis entirely?120freshmen majoring in Agriculture and Water Conservancy Engineering in Northwest A&F University participated in this study. Before the main tests, both English proficiency level and vocabulary size were undertaken by subjects through One-way ANOVA Analysis of their final grades in the winter of2010with the results showed respectively (P=0.736>0.05)(size>3100; P=0.658>0.05), which proved that there is no significant difference among selected subjects and the premise of the following tests has been met. Then selected subjects are equally divided into four groups with thirty subjects in every group, and then each group, at random, is required to finish one of four text-based tasks with ten target words contained.He Jing (2007) re-defined factors in Hulstijn and Laufers model and restricted its components to cognitive category, finally established the New Task Involvement Loads Model including five components (need, search, evaluation, inference and generation). After the empirical research, He believed that this new model can be applied to analyze various tasks to compare their relative effects. So this study, according to the New Task Involvement Loads Model, designed the following four text-based tasks with varying involvement loads:(a) reading and finishing reading comprehension with dictionary for reference, the Involvement Load is2;(b) reading and finishing gap filling with dictionary for reference, the Involvement Load is6;(c) reading and finishing question answering with dictionary for reference, but forbidding copying, the Involvement Load is5;(d) reading and finishing sentence making with dictionary for reference, but forbidding copying and simple sentences, the Involvement Load is4. Twenty minutes later, materials are taken back and the subjects receive the unexpected immediate tests for ten target words for ten minutes. One week later, delayed tests which had the same format and contents as immediate tests were conducted.By using quantitative and qualitative research methods, the data processed by SPSS16.0software showed:(a) there is a significant difference between text-based tasks and vocabulary acquisition (P＜0.005);(b) the gap filling is the most efficient way to acquire vocabulary among four tasks;(c) the Involvement Loads Hypothesis can be corroborated entirely with the application of New Task Involvement Loads Model.The results of this study theoretically provide evidence for the future studies on the incidental vocabulary acquisition with the New Task Involvement Model. Meanwhile, this study, pedagogically, offer some reference for English teachers to optimize vocabulary teaching methods, for English textbook designers to update English learning materials on form and content, as well as for English learners to improve their learning efficiency on vocabulary acquisition.