Effect Of Different Reading Tasks On College Students' Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

The Communicative Teaching Method which became popular in 1980s attracted the researchers'attention to the phenomenon of acquiring vocabulary incidentally, thus led to the researches on Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition. Meanwhile, according to the statistics on the recent researches related to vocabulary Acquisition, most of the studies of incidental vocabulary acquisition were relevant to reading tasks. Besides, there are many studies demonstrating that reading tasks could promote vocabulary retention significantly. Then, what is the relationship between reading tasks and incidental vocabulary acquisition?In this paper, the incidental vocabulary acquisition effect of non-English major freshman students was studied through conducting reading tasks with different involvement loads. There were 90 treatment students, who were freshmen of Hunan University, divided in three experimental groups. Each of the30 students constituted an experimental group. Each group read three identical reading passages but conducted reading tasks with different involvement loads. The immediate and delayed words posttests on 20 target words in the study were given to the students after they finished reading and conducting the corresponding reading tasks. Two test intervals for a week. The researcher gathered the data and SPSS was applied to analyze the results of two posttests. Finally, the main findings are obtained and presented as follows:1) The results of immediate posttest demonstrated that different reading tasks lead to different effect of immediate incidental vocabulary acquisition. The students in Group 1 did not perform as well as students in Group 2 and Group 3 in the efficacy of incidental vocabulary acquisition, and there were significant differences among three groups. In the aspects of incidental receptive and productive incidental vocabulary acquisition, the researcher found that there were significant differences among three groups in both immediate incidental receptive and productive vocabulary acquisition. No matter in receptive aspect or in productive aspect, students in Group 1 performed the worst in incidental vocabulary acquisition while students in Group 3 performed the best.2) The results of the delayed posttest showed that there are significant differences on the vocabulary retention effect among three groups. Students conducting the reading task with highest involvement load in Group 3 remembered more words than students in Group 2, and the students in Group 1 conducting the reading task with the lowest involvement load index retained the least number of words. The results of retention in terms of receptive and productive vocabulary acquisition demonstrated that there were no significant differences among three groups in receptive vocabulary retention, and the significant difference was not found between Group 2 and Group 3 in the aspect of productive vocabulary retention.3) The retention rates in all three groups were quite low, in both receptive word knowledge and productive word knowledge, which proved that most of the target words the treatment students gained one week ago were forgotten.The results of the experiment indicated that different reading tasks led to different effects of incidental vocabulary acquisition. The reading task with higher involvement loads results in better effect of incidental acquisition. In terms of the retention of incidental vocabulary acquisition, different reading tasks led to different retention effect. However, Involvement Load Hypothesis was not testified in this study in the aspect of receptive vocabulary knowledge. And the results of productive vocabulary knowledge demonstrated that this hypothesis was partially correct in this study. It suggests that reading task with higher involvement load index will enhance the incidental vocabulary acquisition, and teachers can apply this to vocabulary teaching. However, learners themselves should spend more time and energy on the consolidation of the words in term of the vocabulary retention.Nevertheless, there were limitations in this study. First, the treatment students in the experiment cannot represent the ability of incidental vocabulary acquisition of the college students in China. Secondly, the genre of reading materials was limited. Lastly, there are other influencing factors, for example, the motivation of the learners, which might affect the results of the experiment.