A Study Of High School English Learners’ Incidental Acquisition Of Formulaic Sequences Based On Involvement Load Hypothesis

In the field of second language acquisition (SLA), vocabulary acquisitionoccupies a critical position, in which incidental vocabulary acquisition has won moreand more attention from linguists and researchers during the recent decades. As onemajor part of vocabulary knowledge, formulaic sequences play an essential role in theEnglish learning and acquisition for high school students, and the mastery offormulaic sequence knowledge has become a key for senior high school Englishlearners in the language acquisition.The present study directs the aim at the incidental acquisition of formulaicsequences by high school English learners, which has already become a heated issuenowadays. For senior high school students, they spend much time learning vocabularyand formulaic sequences, but the result is not ideal. Therefore, it is extremelynecessary to help learners tackle this problem to improve English learning efficiency.In2001, Laufer and Hulstijn proposed the Involvement Load Hypothesis, whichassumed that the vocabulary retention would be better if the task induced higherinvolvement load. In this study, based on the Involvement Load Hypothesis, theresearcher expects to find out1) whether the reading tasks with different involvementload affect the learners’ acquisition of formulaic sequences, that is whether tasks withhigher involvement load are more effective than tasks with lower involvement loadfor learners’ acquisition of formulaic sequences in the immediate and delayed posttest.2) whether various task involvements exert an influence on the learner’s long-termretention of formulaic sequences.The study is conducted empirically by taking senior high school students assubjects from Jiujiang No.1High Middle School, Jiangxi province. The127subjectsfrom two intact classes are divided into three groups, and after reading a same passageeach group is assigned to one of the three tasks which include different involvementloads: a reading comprehension task, a reading comprehension plus fill-in task and anoriginal sentence making task. Upon the completion, an immediate posttest and adelayed posttest are conducted to investigate the retention of the ten target formulaicsequences. Then the original scores are collected and the raw data are analyzed bySPSS17.0.By addressing the collected data, the results show that:1) high school learners can acquire formulaic sequences through reading tasks definitely. In the immediateposttest and delayed posttest, the original sentence making task with the greatestinvolvement load yields the highest retention scores, the reading comprehension plusfill-in task ranks the second, and the reading comprehension task with the lowestinvolvement load retains formulaic sequence knowledge worst.2) in the delayedposttest, the retention scores are much lower than the immediate posttest because oftime, but each group’s long-term retention of formulaic sequence is different, so thevarious task involvements can exert an influence on long-term retention of formulaicsequences.The present study offers both theoretical and practical guidance in the highschool English teaching and learning. Specially, teachers can make more efforts todesign the reading tasks to direct students’ focus on useful formulaic sequences forthe sake of enhancing their relevant knowledge. And students are supposed to raisethe awareness of formulaic sequences learning and consolidate those formulaicsequences acquired incidentally in different ways.