An Empirical Study On The Effect Of Task Type On Senior High School Students' Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Through Reading

Incidental vocabulary acquisition of second language happens when learners are engaged in other learning activities, in which they do not focus their attention on memorizing the new words but acquire some words incidentally. Incidental vocabulary acquisition is an important way of learning vocabulary, so researches in this field are of great value for second language learners and play a significant role in L2 vocabulary pedagogy.Based on the Involvement Load Hypothesis, the present research firstly intends to testify the Involvement Load Hypothesis, and then attempts to explore the effect of different reading task types(receptive tasks and productive tasks) of the same involvement load on senior high school students' incidental vocabulary acquisition.The aim of this study is to investigate whether involvement load is the determining factor to affect incidental vocabulary acquisition, irrespective of task type.The participants in this study were 108 Senior One students enrolled in two parallel classes at Dongjiang Senior High School of Guangzhou University, and the research lasted for three weeks. The study aims to find out answers to the following research questions:1) Do tasks with higher involvement load always give rise to better word recall results than tasks with lower involvement load when they belong to the same task type of reading?2) Which task type can lead to better vocabulary retention when they are of the same involvement load, receptive task type or productive task type?3) Will Senior One students renovate their methods of vocabulary learning through experiencing and learning incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading?The subjects were divided into four groups. After reading the same text, each group was required to accomplish one particular task, namely multiple-choice,blank-filling, meaning-match and sentence-making. An immediate vocabulary testand a delayed test were administered to test the acquisition and retention of the target words. The data collected in this experiment were analyzed by SPSS 19.0. Then conclusions were drawn as follows:1) The experiment results support the Involvement Load Hypothesis: tasks with higher involvement load index lead to better vocabulary acquisition effects when other factors are equal.2) Task-induced involvement is not the determining factor which affects the incidental vocabulary acquisition. Task types can also affect incidental vocabulary acquisition to some degree and output-oriented task is more conductive to incidental vocabulary acquisition than input-oriented task.3) Students can be stimulated to read more, improve vocabulary learning methods and learn words in context incidentally.