An Empirical Study Of Effects Of Reading Tasks On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Of Vocational College Students-Reassessment Of Involvement Load Hypothesis

Abstract:As for the unity of pronunciation, form and meaning, vocabulary plays a key role in language communication. The research connected with it has been the basic content and the main area of language research and has a long history. The lexical learning is the core of language learning either in native languages or in second language teaching and runs through the whole process of language learning. Without a certain amount of vocabulary, listening, speaking, reading and writing can’t be going on smoothly. Vocabulary directly affects one’s language competence. Recent years have seen an increase in the number of publications about exploring the second language vocabulary acquisition and increasing interests of more researchers with the development of second language acquisition research. Yet there isn’t an overall theory of howL2 vocabulary is acquired and our knowledge has mainly been built up from fragmentary studies in the Second Language Acquisition research area. To change this depressing situation, Second Language Acquisition theorists and vocabulary researchers have been taking pains to achieve some breakthrough. So far, the Involvement Load Hypothesis proposed by Laufer & Hulstinjn on the basis of the theory of the depth of processing in 2001-the sole theoretical construct targeting at task-based lexical learning in the area of current Second Language Acquisition, is just a gain from the pains. Since then, many experiments have been conducted to validate the hypothesis. However, owing to flaws of the hypothesis itself and the variations of the research design in different studies, no consensus has been achieved so far.The aims of the study based on the framework of the Involvement Load Hypothesis are to find out the relationship between reading tasks and incidental vocabulary acquisition of Vocational College students and how to effectively enlarge the vocabulary size of Vocational College students by means of different reading tasks, to investigate whether the three components of the construct of the task-induced involvement in Involvement Load Hypothesis:need, search and evaluation play a significant role in incidental vocabulary acquisition of Vocational College students and to validate the Involvement Load Hypothesis at the same time.The present study attempts to answer the following three specific questions:1. Do reading tasks with different involvement load generate different effects on the target words’ acquisition and retention among language learners?2. If they do, are reading tasks with higher involvement loads more effective than tasks with lower involvement load in facilitating the acquisition of the target words?3. If they do, are reading tasks with higher involvement loads more effective than tasks with lower involvement load in facilitating the retention of the target words?To answer the questions above, quantitative research is employed in the study. The subj ects of the study are from three parallel intact classes of non-English majors, freshmen from Civil Engineering Department and Electrical and Mechanical Department. By analyzing the subjects’ scores of English Test in National College Entrance Examination and the scores in Vocabulary Size Test, it could be concluded that there is no significant differences in terms of their English proficiency. The students in the three parallel classes are randomly assigned to three experiment groups which are experiment group 1, experiment group 2 and experiment group 3 respectively, and are required to perform the reading tasks with different involvement load respectively:experiment group 1 for task Ⅰ (reading plus reading comprehension), experiment group 2 for task Ⅱ (reading plus the translation of target words) and experiment group 3 for task Ⅲ (reading plus matching the definition of the target words). The students are requested to perform the tasks in the equal time. The experiment encompassed three tests. They are the pretest to identify the target words, the immediate posttest and the delayed posttest at an interval of two weeks to look into the acquisition and retention of the target word respectively. The data collected in the experiment are analyzed by the software SPSS21.0 and are explained with relevant theories.The results of the study indicate that incidental vocabulary acquisition and retention does happen among the Vocational College students through reading and performing certain reading tasks with different involvement load, tasks with greater involvement load don’t necessarily facilitate the better acquisition and retention of target words than tasks with lower involvement load and there was no significant difference in the acquisition and retention of the target words between the moderate evaluation and the strong evaluation as one of the components of the task-induced construct in Involvement Load Hypothesis:evaluation.To conclude, the study partially supports the validation of Involvement Load Hypothesis and confirms reading plus reading tasks with different involvement does facilitate the Vocational College students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition and retention.