An Empirical Study Of The Impact Of Involvement Load On Incidental Vocabulary Learning

Vocabulary learning is put in the essential position in second language acquisition.Therefore,numerous researchers and instructors have devoted themselves to exploring the effective ways of L2 vocabulary learning for a long time,one of which is widely known as incidental vocabulary learning that lexical learning is achieved as the by-product in reading activities.As a large amount of research has shown,various reading tasks can facilitate incidental vocabulary learning to different degrees and researchers tried to interpret their different effects on the word retention from the cognitive view which was not testable because of the lack of a standard to quantify the cognitive notion until Laufer and Hulstijn(2001)proposed the Involvement Load Hypothesis as the only measurable standard.The current research intends to verify the Involvement Load Hypothesis and explore whether the three components of the involvement load(need,search,evaluation)bear equal weight.In addition,the author attempts to figure out the influence of task type upon word retention in incidental learning.One hundred and fifty-one subjects who are non-English major freshmen from Xi'an International Studies University participated in the study.Five tasks designed with different involvement loads and different task types were randomly assigned to all the subjects in five classes.Then the immediate posttest in which subjects were required to write down the meanings of ten target items in either Chinese or English would be conducted to all the participants once they completed the reading tasks.The delayed posttest was carried out to the subjects in each group one week later,which was exactly the same as the target-word retention sheet in the immediate test.The outcomes partially confirmed the Involvement Load Hypothesis that claims higher-involvement tasks exert better effects on word retention than lower-involvement tasks,and the involvement load does not have the decisive role in the incidental vocabulary learning.The results also proved that the output task can facilitate incidental vocabulary learning and induce better effects in short memory,butthe effects do not retain in the long-term memory.In addition,it is suggested that the component “evaluation” has more positive impact on vocabulary retention than the factor “search”.Based on the results and discussions,both theoretical and pedagogical implications are listed,and the limitations of the current study as well as some practical suggestions for further investigations are also mentioned in the end.