The Empirical Study On Junior High School Students’ Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Based On Task Involvement Load

Vocabulary learning is crucial in second language acquisition.How to motivate and promote students’ vocabulary acquisition in the process of teaching has been viewed as a key task in the field of second language acquisition.Word power facilitates fluent speaking and effective writing.It not only helps students acquire knowledge but also produces knowledge.It enriches learners’ integrated language skills such as listening,speaking,reading and writing.However,teachers usually adopt direct vocabulary teaching methods in China.And the students spend a lot of time learning words in an isolate way,but they can’t really do well in practical applications.In terms of language acquisition,incidental learning is said to be an effective way of learning vocabulary from context.Based on the involvement load hypothesis,the following two questions are mainly discussed.(1)Does reading task with higher involvement load index lead to better than the task with lower involvement load index in English vocabulary acquisition? If yes,how? If no,why?(2)Does incidental vocabulary acquisition have any impacts on junior high school students’ vocabulary learning? If yes,what are the impacts? If no,why? To address these questions,the research method is comparative experimental method.The participants are 90 students from two intact classes in Grade Eight and an English teacher in Langfang No.2 Middle School.The two classes are taught by the same English teacher but in different reading tasks.Task 1 was a reading comprehension followed by filling-in blanks in 15 minutes(1+0+1).Task 2was to make sentences with the target works after reading in 20 minutes(1+0+2).The instruments employed in this study are questionnaires,vocabulary tests and interview on the participants.The major findings can be summarized as follows.Firstly,the results showed that the sentences-making task leads to better result than filling-in blank task in vocabulary learning.It is fully supports the Involvement Load Hypothesis proposed by Laufer and Hulstijn(2001).Secondly,the results of this experiment show thatstudents’ attitude towards vocabulary learning has changed greatly,and they attach greater importance to vocabulary learning.In addition,their interest and confidence in vocabulary learning have been markedly enhanced and vocabulary learning methods and strategies have also been improved.According to the experimental process and data analysis of this research,the author suggests application of the incidental vocabulary acquisition may become a facilitator of vocabulary teaching so as to improve students’ vocabulary acquisition efficiency.Of course,the limitation and expectation for future research are also provided.