An Investigation Into The Effects Of Reading Tasks On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition In Senior High School Students

Based on the Involvement Load Hypothesis and from the perspective of involvement load and task type of the task design, this study aims to investigate the effects of task-induced involvement and different task types on incidental vocabulary acquisition in senior high school students. Meanwhile, improvement approaches to the deficiencies of the Involvement Load Hypothesis are quested, providing some implications for L2 vocabulary teaching. The research questions are expounded as follows: (1) How do reading tasks with different involvement loads influence incidental vocabulary acquisition among senior high school students? (2) In terms of initial word gains and word retention, what are the differences between the effects of reading tasks of different types (interpretive and productive) on senior high school students' incidental vocabulary acquisition? (3) From the perspective of senior high school English teaching,in what way can the Involvement Load Hypothesis be improved?In this study, three parallel classes of Grade 10 from a senior high school in Nanjing are selected as participants and they are divided as three parallel treatment groups assigned with three different reading tasks respectively. The three tasks are multiple choice questions after reading comprehension, gap-filling after looking up target words in the dictionary, and answering related questions with original sentences. Upon finishing the tasks, an immediate vocabulary test and a delayed vocabulary test one week later are carried out. Both quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis are applied to analyze the data collected.Major research findings are presented below: (1) Reading tasks with higher involvement loads generally lead to better initial word gains and delayed word gains than tasks with lower involvement loads but both fail to bring about satisfying retention effect of vocabulary. (2) With the same involvement load,there is no significant difference between the effect of the interpretive task and the productive task on immediate word acquisition while as for the effect on word retention, the productive task appears much superior to the interpretive task. (3) In senior high school English teaching, application of the Involvement Load Hypothesis should take into account various factors like lexical factors,learner factors and task types; the component "search" needs perfection in its connotation. Therefore, pedagogical implications can be elicited: (1) Comprehensible input must be provided as much as possible. (2) After-reading tasks varying in involvement load and task type can be designed to facilitate incidental acquisition of different kinds of vocabulary. (3) Rehearsal can never be overemphasized in incidental vocabulary acquisition.