An Empirical Study On The Effect Of Involvement Load On Junior High School Students' Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Through Reading

Vocabulary has been playing an important part in people's communication and language learning. However, direct vocabulary teaching has been taken as the main teaching method in junior high school. The students spent a large amount of time learning the words in an isolate way or reciting vocabulary but the effect is not so satisfactory.In the past decade, incidental vocabulary acquisition has attracted much attention and proved to be an effective way of acquiring vocabulary. But most of the subjects of previous studies are college students or senior high school students. Based on the involvement load hypothesis of Laufer & Hulstijn(2001), this study which is carried out among the junior high school students attempts to answer the following two questions:1) Which task can lead to better vocabulary retention to junior high school students, fill-in blank or sentence-writing?2) Can incidental vocabulary acquisition change students' attitude in vocabulary learning?Two parallel experimental classes(all together 80 students, each class 40 students) in Grade Eight from Huizhou No. 3 Middle School participated in this experiment. The two classes are in charged by the author. There is one reading plus lesson every week from week 3 to week 10 in each class. The students from the two classes were all required to answer the relevant questions after reading in 15 minutes. Then students from Class Four had to finish the fill-in blank task in 10 minutes while students from Class Three were required to use the target words to make their own sentences in 15 minutes. The involvement load index of fill-in blank task is 3(moderate need, search and moderate evaluation) while the involvement load index of sentence-making task is 4(moderate need, search and strong evaluation). The instruments employed in this study were two questionnaires(one pre-experiment questionnaire and one post-experiment questionnaire), two vocabulary tests(one immediate test and one delayed test) and one post-experiment interview made among 6 students. Based on the collected data, the major findings can be summarized as follows:First, this study fully supports the Involvement Load Hypothesis proposed by Laufer & Hulstijn(2001). That is, the sentence-making task leads to better result than fill-in blank task in vocabulary learning.Second, incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading makes great difference to students' attitude towards vocabulary learning. More and more students realize the importance of vocabulary learning and they are also willing to learn vocabulary through reading.The study provides further empirical evidence for junior high school English vocabulary teaching and learning.