A Study Of Different Tasks-based Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition By Senior High School Learners

Vocabulary acquisition is one of the most important tasks of second languageacquisition, and language skills, including listening, speaking, reading, writing andtranslating, are all related to it closely. Therefore, the study of second language vocabularyacquisition becomes an increasingly hot topic for theorists, teachers and researchers(Coady,1997). In recent years, to improve vocabulary through reading has been advocatedby foreign language teaching researchers, however, a lot of domestic researches show thatextensive reading with no guidance results in acquiring vocabulary rarely. On thefoundation of the relevant theories of incidental vocabulary acquisition (IVA), this thesisaims to research the effects on incidental vocabulary acquisition by different tasks forsenior high school learners. To be specific, the paper aims to answer the following researchquestions, the first one: which task is more effective on incidental vocabulary acquisitionof the participants, reading task, writing task or the continuation task; the second one:which task is more effective on vocabulary retention of the participants, reading task,writing task, or the continuation task; the third one: does the participant’s vocabulary levelaffect incidental vocabulary acquisition and vocabulary retention by different tasks.In this study, the subjects are153students in Grade Two from three parallel classes inFushun country senior high school in Liaoning province. They are divided into threegroups, which are reading group, writing group and the continuation task group. All theseparticipants of the experimental groups are randomly assigned to complete three tasks inthe routine class time, and then take part in the vocabulary tests on the target words by theimmediate test and the delayed test. And the data of the two tests is analyzed through SPSSstatistical software.Data analysis of the test based on the research by different tasks in the immediatevocabulary posttest shows that on the value of mean, the reading-task group has the scoresof23.7437, the writing-task group has the scores of26.8659and the continuation taskgroup has the scores of27.3275, however, there is no significant difference between thewriting-task group and the continuation task group; the data analysis of the test based onthe research by different tasks in the delayed vocabulary posttest presents that on the valueof mean, the reading-task group receives20.5262, the writing-task group receives23.7436and the continuation task group receives26.9071, what’s more, there is significantdifference among the three tasks; the descriptive data of3groups of subjects’ vocabularylevel in the immediate test and delayed test show that the participants’ vocabulary level ofthe medium group and the low group has an affect on their incidental vocabulary acquisition and vocabulary retention with different tasks, but there is no significantinfluence between the subjects’ vocabulary level of the high group and their incidentalvocabulary acquisition as well as vocabulary retention.The results indicate that the current research partially validates the Involvement LoadHypothesis which mainly states that the more the task-based involvement loads areinduced, the better the impacts on retention of vocabulary by tasks make, meanwhile, all ofthe subjects in the three tasks groups tend to possess the short-term incidental vocabularyand long-term vocabulary retention favor through finishing treatments with different taskssuccessfully what’s more, the continuation task has the better impact on incidentalvocabulary acquisition and on vocabulary retention for the participants completing thearticles with different tasks. The reason is possibly that the continuation task integratesinput with output closely and combines learning with the application as well as effectivelyimproves students’ ability of vocabulary acquisition. And the higher the participants’vocabulary level is, the less of impacts on incidental vocabulary acquisition andvocabulary retention the different tasks make, because only for the participants with lowervocabulary levels, the difference between different tasks is obvious. This study proposes tothe senior high school students how to improve their ability of vocabulary acquisition andshows a few related suggestions on future research in this field as well as discusses thelimitations of this experiment.