A Study On The Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition From Involvement Load Hypothesis

Vocabulary acquisition has long been a great focus in the second language research.A great many L2 researchers and teachers have carried out a lot of researches about how to enlarge learners' vocabulary.Due to the continuously deepening empirical research on L2 vocabulary acquisition,more and more researchers have proposed that different tasks can promote different vocabulary acquisition results,but there is no consensus on how to define and measure the specific involvement in these tasks.Based on a series of inspiring research findings,Laufer & Hulstijn(2001)formulated the involvement load hypothesis,which claims that the higher the level of the involvement load;the more effective the task is in promoting vocabulary acquisition.The hypothesis proposes the “involvement” construct to evaluate the degree of an L2 learner's cognitive processing in a given task,through which the effects of reading tasks with different involvement load on L2 vocabulary acquisition are clearly revealed.This hypothesis arouses immediate discussion among the research field.A lot of experiments conducted in recent years;however,no consistent results have been achieved to confirm it so far.In order to verify whether the Involvement Load Hypothesis has an impact on the incidental vocabulary acquisition of Higher Vocational College students,this study selected 84 non-English major freshmen as the research subjects,this study,through the comparison of three reading tasks(including the multiple choice,answering questions and writing the main idea)tests the reasonability of the involvement load hypothesis in memorizing English words.Meanwhile,this study selects three English reading materials,respectively with three reading tasks;the students who completed each reading task will have the immediate relevant word test from the reading material.A month later,the students will have the delayed test according to the original order like the immediate relevant word test.This study adopts quantitative and qualitative analysis to analyze the data.The statistic results show that three reading tasks only have significant differences in the immediate test,in which the task of writing the idea has the best effect in incidental vocabulary acquisition for Higher Vocational College students,followed by the task of multiple choices,but answering-question task does not produce the expected vocabulary memory effect.There is no significant difference between the three reading tasks in the delayed test.There is a positive co-relation of between English achievements and incidental vocabulary acquisition.English learners of good level acquired more incidental vocabularies than poor and middle-level English students.According to this study,this paper also puts forward some suggestions for English vocabulary teaching in Higher Vocational Colleges.