A Study Of The Effect Of Different Reading Tasks On English Majors’ Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition In Vocational Colleges

In2001, Laufer and Hulstijin put forward the Involvement Load Hypothesis (ILH)from the motivational and cognitive points of view, which can be measured by threecomponents: need, search and evaluation. The hypothesis holds that incidental vocabularyacquisition (IVA) in reading is closely related to reading tasks. It claims that the greater theinvolvement loads induced by a task during the vocabulary processing, the betteracquisition and retention of vocabulary will be. In the current study, ILH was employed toinvestigate the effects of different reading tasks on learners’ incidental acquisition andretention of L2word-form knowledge, and find out whether the hypothesis can predict theproductive vocabulary effectiveness.The present experiment was conducted within a period of two weeks.130sophomoresof English majors from Vocational College of Ningbo Dahongying University took part inperforming the reading tasks and vocabulary tests. The author divided them into fourgroups randomly and assigned them to complete four different tasks with varyinginvolvement loads after reading a passage in a certain period of time. The four tasks are:Reading Comprehension, Blank Filling with Glossary, Blank Filling without Glossary andWord Guessing plus Reading Comprehension. The participants were unexpectedly testedon retention of the ten target words in an immediate test and a post test which wasconducted one week later. The data were analyzed with the aid of SPSS19.0.The results of the study have partially supported the ILH: learners are able to acquirethe word-form knowledge incidentally in the reading process; learners performing taskswith lower involvement loads have not acquired vocabulary as well as those completingtasks with higher involvement loads. However, the results of the post test have shown thatlearners’ scores of the word spelling suffered a great loss in all the four groups and therewas no significant difference among the average scores of each group, which indicates thattasks with higher involvement load do not have the superiority on word-form retention one week later. Tasks with the same amount of involvement load have led to similar retention.Output tasks are superior to input tasks in fostering word-form knowledge retention in theimmediate test, however, the significant superiority disappears in the post test.Based on the above results, some pedagogical implications are presented in the thesis:in order to better acquire unknown vocabulary, learners should learn both intentionally andincidentally. Teachers should design various types of tasks with different involvementloads according to specific teaching purposes. For example, to help learners master theproductive vocabulary knowledge, teachers are usually advised to design specificword-formation exercises; while such exercises as comprehension questions, blank fillingor sentence making which focus on language meaning processing, are more appropriate forreceptive vocabulary knowledge learning. Teachers are recommended to create moreopportunities for the learners to encounter the target words in different contexts.Meanwhile, learners are strongly suggested to review and rehearse the newly-acquiredlexical knowledge in order to produce better retention.The current investigation hopes to make some contributions to L2vocabularyacquisition. However, further empirical researches are desired to make the hypothesis amore perfect and mature one.