The Study Of Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition On English Reading Of High Schools From The Involvement Load Hypothesis Perspective

Ever since Laufer and Hulstijn (2001) proposed the Involvement Load Hypothesis (ILH), much efforthas been devoted to testing it. One of the issues that most researchers and instructors are concerned with isthe efficiency of the three involvement components (need, search and evaluation) on L2learners’vocabulary acquisition. Researches in this field bring out mixed findings: while some studies find positiveresults and confirm the hypothesis, others only demonstrate very limited effect. Under such a situation, thepresent study is designed to explore this issue more precisely.The subjects in this study are120senior high school students from three intact parallel classes. Theyare randomly assigned to six groups and are required to complete different reading tasks. The tasks differ interms of the distribution of the three involvement components and task types, so as to testify ILH bycomparing the effects of the three components on incidental vocabulary acquisition, comparing the effectsof tasks of the same type with different involvement load on incidental vocabulary acquisition as well asthe impact of different tasks types on incidental vocabulary acquisition.The results of the study indicate that the involvement component evaluation shows a greater power inpromoting L2learners’ incidental vocabulary acquisition, and tasks with higher involvement loadoutperform those with lower involvement load, which partially proves the Involvement Load Hypothesis.However, the results also show that the performances of all six groups decline sharply from immediate testto post test, which manifests the necessity of practice and revision.Basing on the findings from the study, the author proposes some theoretical and pedagogicalimplications for vocabulary learning and teaching. For researchers, some pieces of advice on time span anddiversification of task types are provided to polish the further research. Teachers and learners are alsosuggested to design or engage in tasks with different involvement load and various types according toteaching program and objective for the sake of vocabulary acquisition.