An Empirical Study On The Incidental Acquisition Of Collocations In L2

Vocabulary learning is one of the most important aspects of language learning and its importance has attracted the attention of foreign language researchers. Just as the English linguist Wilkins (1972:111) put it, "Without grammar, little can be conveyed; without vocabulary, nothing can be conveyed." In recent years, an increasing number of researchers and language teachers come to realize the importance of vocabulary and acquisition of vocabulary, especially the role of incidental vocabulary acquisition in vocabulary learning. According to the Involvement Load Hypothesis proposed by Laufer & Hulstijn (2001:1), incidental vocabulary acquisition has a close relation with reading tasks, namely, the greater the involvement load in vocabulary, the better the vocabulary retention.With the development of corpora linguistics, the research field of collocation has greatly enlarged. However, the incidental acquisition of collocation by L2 learners in China is seldom explored, and relevant studies on junior high school students are comparatively rare. This study, by analyzing the effect of reading tasks on L2 beginners' incidental acquisition of English collocation under the theoretical framework of Involvement Load Hypothesis (ILH) theory, aims to answer the following questions:1. Do different reading tasks have different effects on incidental acquisition of collocation?2. How do reading tasks affect student's acquisition and retention of receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge?3. Do students' reading abilities affect their incidental acquisition of English collocation?The whole study consists of two experiments lasting two months. The subjects in the experiment are 65 second-year junior school students from Laoshan No.3 Middle School in Qingdao. All the students are randomly divided into two groups and given two different reading tasks with six reading passages. After 9reading, the subjects are requested to take an immediate vocabulary test and a delayed vocabulary test one week later. In the second experiment, the students are divided into two groups according to their reading ability. Similarly, they read the materials and are tested in the two vocabulary tests.The data collected from the experiments are analyzed by SPSS 19.0 and conclusions are drawn as follows:Firstly, the junior high school students can acquire collocation incidentally through different reading tasks;Secondly, students perform better in the task with a higher involvement load than students in the task with a lower involvement load; the three factors play a positive role during the acquisition process;Thirdly, the students' reading abilities do exert influence on their incidental acquisition of collocation; the high the reading abilities they have, the more collocation they acquire. Meanwhile, students tend to pay more attention to these collocations if the collocations appear three or more times in the reading passage.The present study has much theoretical and practical significance in English teaching and learning. The findings of the present study not only partially support the Involvement Load Hypothesis but also provide specific methods for English teachers in teaching collocation. To be specific, based on incidental acquisition teachers should design different reading tasks to help students acquire more collocation in order to enlarge their vocabulary. As for English learners, it will be a more effective way for them to broaden their vocabulary by extensive reading rather than by rote memory.