Researching The Effects Of Different After-reading Tasks On Senior High School Students’ Vocabulary Acquisition

As a prerequisite for the second language learning, vocabulary acquisition is viewed as an essential part in the domain of second language learning. How to get learners master more words in the limited class time has been concerned by English researchers and teachers. Given this situation, scholars put forward the notion of incidental vocabulary acquisition, which refers to the learning of new words as a by-product of other language activities. Given the weakness of the low vocabulary growth rate in only reading condition, effort is made to improve the incidental vocabulary acquisition with input and output after-reading tasks. Research to date has compared the effects of input and output tasks, but the role of different output tasks on incidental vocabulary acquisition has received very little attention. Therefore, based on the Depth of Processing Theory and Involvement Load Hypothesis, the current study makes an attempt to investigate the effects of different after-reading tasks on senior high school students’ vocabulary acquisition as to answer the following research questions:1. Which after-reading task, cloze or summary writing, has better effects on word meaning acquisition for senior high school students?2. Which after-reading task, cloze or summary writing, has better effects on word use acquisition for senior high school students?To answer the questions, one hundred and thirty eight high school students of same English proficiency level from three parallel classes are chosen as participants in the experiment. They are randomly divided into three groups. One group is used to select the target words in the pilot study, and other two groups are assigned to finish one of the two tasks:(1) reading with cloze test,(2) reading with summary writing. Then, they are given a vocabulary test in which they need to write the meaning of the words and make a sentence with the words. The data is analyzed by SPSS 17.0.The results indicate that the two after-reading tasks have positive effects on incidental vocabulary acquisition. As for word meaning acquisition, summary writing performs better than cloze test. While with regard to word usage acquisition, cloze test is more effective than summary writing. In the light of the findings, some effective and feasible suggestions are provided for both teachers and students to enhance vocabulary acquisition.