Effects Of Cognitive Style And Task Involvement Load On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition:An Empirical Study

Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition is under great attention recently as a relatively new domain in the field of Second Language Acquisition.Involvement Load Hypothesis was put forward by Laufer to investigate the effect of different tasks on incidental vocabulary acquisition.This study further studied this theory and combined this with cognitive style theories to study the effect of them on English language learners' incidental vocabulary acquisition.Three research questions were explored in this study: 1)what is the effect of cognitive style preference on L2 learners' incidental vocabulary acquisition? 2)What is the effect of reading tasks' task-induced involvement load on L2 learners' incidental vocabulary acquisition? 3)What is the effect of reading tasks with different task-induced involvement load on incidental vocabulary acquisition of L2 learners with different cognitive style preference? 123 senior high school students were recruited for the study and were divided into four groups according to their FD/FI cognitive style tendency.Three major findings of this study are: 1)The students of high field independence tendency perform better in immediate vocabulary gains but not vocabulary retaining.2)The students who finish the tasks with higher task-induced involvement load perform better in both immediate and delayed incidental vocabulary acquisition.3)Cognitive style and task-induced involvement load have positive effects to each other and the students of field independent cognitive style who finish tasks with the highest task-induced involvement load perform best in incidental vocabulary acquisition.This study still has many limitations to be addressed in future research,but it also provides some theoretical and practical implications on the domain of SLA.