An Empirical Study On The Influence Of Reading Tasks On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Among English Majors

Nowadays,the importance of vocabulary learning has been acknowledged by more and more researchers and scholars in foreign language learning.Hence,how to learn more vocabulary efficiently has been of great concern.In the past decade,incidental vocabulary acquisition has become a new method of learning vocabulary.Based on involvement load hypothesis and depth of processing theory(Schmidt,1990;Hulstijn&Laufer,2001),three different reading tasks(reading comprehension with sentence making task,gap-filling task,summary writing task)have been designed that in order to examine the effects of reading tasks on incidental vocabulary acquisition among English majors.A vocabulary levels test has also been designed for the research to investigate whether vocabulary size has an effect on incidental vocabulary acquisition.Two questions are investigated in the research:1.Do different post reading tasks have different effects on incidental vocabulary acquisition?2.Do the same post reading tasks have different effects among learners of different vocabulary levels on incidental vocabulary acquisition?Three parallel classes of English sophomores in a university of Li Ning have participated in the experiment and they were assigned to three different reading tasks randomly.After they completed the vocabulary levels test and reading post tasks,the immediate vocabulary test of target words was distributed among the students.Two weeks later,the students received the delayed vocabulary test with the same target words in a different order.The students have not been informed of vocabulary tests in advance.After the data collection,SPSS 17.0 has been used to analyze the data and the researcher has got the following conclusions:1.Different reading post tasks have different effects on incidental vocabulary acquisition because reading tasks have different involvement loads,but due to the effect of forgetting,the acquisition rate of vocabulary decreased a lot during the long period.Summary writing is the most influenced task.Tasks with higher involvement load do necessarily lead to better vocabulary acquisition2.Vocabulary size does have an impact on incidental vocabulary acquisition.Learners of large vocabulary size acquired the vocabulary better than those of small vocabulary size.From the theoretical perspective,the research tested and enriched the involvement load hypothesis and depth of processing theory.From the practical perspective,the research has provided some pedagogic implications.Teachers could design different reading tasks according to different needs to complement traditional vocabulary teaching.As the vocabulary size has a significant impact on incidental vocabulary acquisition,teachers should encourage students to improve vocabulary size through different ways such as reading English magazines and novels,or watching American movies.