Effects Of Glossing Types And Task-induced Involvement Load On Senior High School Students' Incidental Acquisition Of English Collocations

Involvement Load Theory argues that task-induced involvement can have an effect on incidental vocabulary learning.A great number of experiments have been conducted to explore incidental learning of individual words whereas few studies focus on the relationship between Involvement Load Hypothesis and incidental acquisition of collocations.Research shows that glossing can not only enhance learners' reading ability but also promote incidental vocabulary learning.However,little research concerns the effect of glossing types and task-induced involvement load on incidental collocation acquisition.The paper investigates the effect of these two independent variables on collocation acquisition.The research is intended to answer the following questions:1)What is the effect of different glossing types on incidental collocation acquisition in both immediate test and delayed test?2)What is the effect of reading tasks with different involvement load on incidental collocation acquisition in both immediate test and delayed test?3)What is the interactive effect of glossing types and reading tasks with different involvement on incidental collocation acquisition in both immediate test and delayed test?First,participants take part in vocabulary size test,then the researcher analyzes their mid-term scores and vocabulary size test scores.Students who are divided into four groups read a passage with different glossing types and then finish different reading tasks(L1 glossing of collocation + translation,LI glossing of collocation + comprehension questions,L1 glossing of individual words + translation,L1 glossing of individual words+ comprehension questions).In immediate test,the participants are required to translate target collocations into Chinese.One week later,participants complete a delayed test whose content is the same as that of immediate test but with different order to investigate the retention of target collocations.The current research adopts both qualitative and quantitative method and use ANOVA for analyzing effects of glossing types and task-induced involvement on incidental collocation acquisition.Their immediate and delayed test scores are put into SPSS 16.0 for analysis.The major findings are as follows:1)In immediate test,there is a significant difference between glossing types on incidental collocation acquisition.The collocational meaning arises from the interaction between a given node and its typical collocates.Meaning by collocation is an abstraction at syntagmatic level and is not directly concerned with conceptual or idea approach to the meaning of words.But in delayed test,glossing types do not have significant effect on collocation acquisition.According to Depth of Processing Hypothesis,the chance that some pieces of new information is stored in long-term memory is not determined by the length of time but rather by the shallowness or depth which it is initially processed.Given Chinese meaning,participants process lexical items at a rather shallow level.The target collocations which are forgotten one week later are stored in short memory,so there is no difference between glossing types in delayed test.2)In both immediate and delayed test,there is a significant effect between task-induced involvement load on collocation acquisition.Main(2008)states that productive tasks have better memory performance than acceptive tasks.Participants are required to translate the whole sentence into Chinese,which demands more attention to the task and in-depth understanding of the target collocations.During the process of answering comprehension questions,participants just write answers according to the passage with little noticing and attention to target collocations.Translation task is a productive task involving deeper processing while comprehension questions is a recognizable task.As a result,participants who finish translation tasks have better performance than those who completing comprehension questions.3)There is no interactive effect between glossing types and task-induced involvement in both immediate and delayed test.In immediate test,the main effect of glossing types is.166,which is twice as that of task-induced involvement.086.Although both glossing and task-induced involvement enhance meaning(Zhou rong,2010),glossing plays a major role which overrides the effect of task-induced involvement in the process,which can explain why there is no interactive effect in immediate test.In delayed test,glossing also has little effect on collocation acquisition because participants process lexical items at a rather shallow level.The target collocations stored in short memory are forgotten one week later.As a result,there is almost no interaction effect between two independent variables,glossing types and task-induced involvement load.Some pedagogical implications for teaching have been discussed.The results of this study demonstrate that collocation acquisition is influenced by the task types.The task with higher involvement load can make students perform better in the immediate and delayed collocation tests.Therefore,tasks of higher involvement load can be designed by teachers to maintain an effective collocation acquisition result and increase their vocabulary.