A Study On The Effectiveness Of Involvement Load Hypothesis On Incidental Acquisition Of English Vocabulary Among Senior High School Students

This paper studies on the effectiveness of the Involvement Load Hypothesis by Laufer & Hulstijin(2001)on the incidental vocabulary acquisition among senior high school students.Involvement Load Hypothesis refers to word and retention are dependent on the deep processing of new words.The involvement load can stand for the degree of cognitive processing.Task-induced includes three basic factors: need,search and evaluation.In addition,they proposed that tasks with higher involvement load are deemed more effects of learning vocabulary than lower involvement load.Incidental learning refers to when completing a task and processing the information,subjects don't know they need to do a test after memorizing some content.Recent years,many experts and scholars study on the effectiveness of ILH on incidental vocabulary acquisition,however,they get different results that some researchers support the Involvement Load Hypothesis,but others partially support the opinion.Based on the Involvement Load Hypothesis,this paper explores the effectiveness of incidental vocabulary acquisition in the reading.First,research subjects are from four parallel key Class of Grade Two students in NO 2 senior high school in Mudanjiang city.Second,based on the ILH,four different reading types are designed in this paper,including reading+ choice(target words with glosses),reading+ gap-filling(target words with glosses),reading+ gap-filling(target words without glosses),reading+ sentence-writing(target words with glosses).Then ten target words are from reading text through pre-test,adopting immediate test and multiple delayed tests(posttest)to verify the effectiveness of incidental vocabulary acquisition.This paper studies on three research questions: 1)Do tasks with higher involvement loads lead to better effect of the incidental vocabulary acquisition? Which kind of task can achieve the best effect of vocabulary acquisition with different involvement load? 2)What are the effects of incidental vocabulary acquisition when students take the immediate test and multiple delayed tests with the same involvement load? 3)Do higher scores suggest better effect of vocabulary acquisition in reading test?The results are as follows: 1)Task-induced involvement can influence effect of vocabulary acquisition.In addition,different reading tasks with higher involvement load can produce better effect of vocabulary acquisition that supports ILH.2)Different reading types with the same involvement load lead to different effects of vocabulary acquisition in the immediate test or delayed test that are opposed to ILH.3)There are positive correlation between reading scores and vocabulary scores in reading+ gap-filling and reading +sentence-writing,however,there is no obvious relationship between reading and vocabulary scores in reading+ choice.It is obvious that reading types and involvement load index may impact on correlation.In a word,the experiment supports the effect of ILH and points to students can acquire vocabulary under no awareness.These findings verify the positive effect of ILH on incidental vocabulary acquisition.According to ILH,teachers can design suitable reading tasks to improve the vocabulary scores.But there are few shortcomings in this paper.First,we only focus on ten target words and short time experiment,besides,it is not all-sided that only four reading tasks are presented in the test.So,it is necessary to further study the effectiveness of ILH according to controlling different relevant factors.