An Empirical Study On Senior High School English Learners’ Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Based On Involvement Load Hypothesis

Incidental acquisition is one of the top issues in vocabulary acquisition these days. Language learners can learn new words more or less incidentally while cultivating the different basic language skills. However high school students still learn a language mainly in reading. Then which task is the most efficient means in incidental vocabulary acquisition deserves our further study.Many theories concerning incidental vocabulary learning have emerged, among which Laufer and Hulstijin’s(2001) Involvement Load Hypothesis receives wide appreciation. The theory indicates that the more reading involvement load, the better vocabulary acquisition and retention. Therefore, this study within the framework of the Involvement Load Hypothesis aims to testify the effectiveness of tasks with different involvement loads on retention of incidental vocabulary knowledge through reading. Meanwhile, the study intends to testify the validity of the hypothesis.In this study the researcher adopts three reading tasks, namely, reading comprehension, reading comprehension and translating and reading comprehension and sentence making and gives 105 first year students in high school the immediate post-test and delayed post-test. Based on former empirical studies of Involvement Load Hypothesis, the researcher adds multiple-choice gloss to the reading tasks. The data is assessed by means of three vocabulary tests and a questionnaire. SPSS 13.0 is used to analyze the quantitative data from the experiment.The following results are drawn from the experiment: in the immediate post-test. The subjects can acquire and retain the written form knowledge incidentally through completing tasks with different involvement loads. And the results also show that tasks with higher involvement loads can yield better immediate retention than tasks with lower involvement loads. However, in the delayed post-test, the three groups suffered from a great loss of productive vocabulary knowledge. Although there did exist significant differences among three groups, the sentence making group and translating group performed equivalently in long-term retention of productive vocabulary knowledge. With regard to the effects of productive vocabulary retention, there were no long-lasting effects on productive vocabulary retention except reading comprehension group as a consequence of low immediate gains in immediate post-test. The results of the present experiment partially supported the Involvement Load Hypothesis. Meanwhile, some pedagogical implications were suggested to improve vocabulary teaching in senior high school.