An Empirical Study Of Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Based On Task Involvement Load

When it comes to language learning, vocabulary, without any doubt, plays a very profound role, since lack of vocabulary hinders the development of learners integrativc language proficiency to a large extent.It is found that different learning tasks lead to different incidental vocabulary. gains. Hulstijn and Laufer (2001) put forward the "Involvement Load Hypothesis", in which the construct of the task-induced involvement has been introduced to measure the learning task. The task induced with higher involvement load would result in more acquisition of lexical items than that with the lower involvement load. Based on this hypothesis. the present study aims to investigate the potential relevance of different learning tasks to English language vocabulary that were incidentally acquired. The research questions are:(1) Do the task with higher involvement load result in better incidental vocabulary acquisition and retention than that with lower involvement load?(2) Do tasks with the same involvement load but categorized into input and output types lead to the same incidental vocabulary acquisition and retention?Ninety non-English majors are required to accomplish three different learning tasks:one input and two output tasks, in which Task1and2have the same involvement load, but the involvement load of Task3is the most. Respectively. Task1.2and3are input task to do reading and answer comprehension questions with dictionary use, output task to do reading and fill the blanks with given words:Task3is output task to do reading and make sentences with the target words. The immediate vocabulary test and the delayed test two weeks later are conducted for the three groups and all the data are entered into SPSS16.0to do further analysis.The statistic results of this study denoted that learners were able to gain English vocabulary, cither the receptive knowledge or the productive knowledge, by reading and doing tasks; the learning tasks induced with higher involvement load leads to significantly more incidental English vocabulary gains than that with lower involvement load:compared with the input tasks. the output tasks with the same amount of involvemenl load lead to more vocabulary gains. Meanwhile, it suggestsuseful ways in which typical learning tasks coukl be modilkd【0suit second languagelearners, demonstrates, to what extent, the tasks could facilitale the incidental Englishvocabulary acquisition, and provides a guideline with regard to self-study in theaspect of incidentally acquiring English language vocabulary. The study sheds lightupon the teaching and learning of second language.