The Effects Of Involvement Loads In English Reading On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Of Senior High School Students

This study mainly investigates the effects of the involvement loads on incidental vocabulary acquisition in reading among senior high school students.Recent years,mostly based on the Involvement Load Hypothesis(Laufer,B.&Hulstijn,J.H.,2001),many researchers home and abroad conducted many researches on the impact of the reading tasks with different involvement loads,but there are still few in studying the impact of the reading tasks with the same involvement load on incidental vocabulary acquisition,and the effects of the involvement load on incidental vocabulary acquisition of second language learners with different levels of language proficiency,especially the researches on senior high school students.This study will further discuss the issue in these aspects.Here are the research questions:1.What are the effects of different involvement loads in reading tasks on incidental English vocabulary acquisition of senior high school students?2.What are the effects of the same involvement load in reading tasks on incidental English vocabulary acquisition of senior high school students?3.What are the effects of the involvement load in reading tasks on incidental English vocabulary acquisition of senior high school students with different levels of English proficiency?4.What are the current situation of senior high school students' vocabulary learning and students' attitudes towards vocabulary learning?This study combined both quantitative and qualitative methods to implement the research.The subjects enrolled are 165 senior high school students from four parallel natural classes from a senior high school in Jiangsu Province.The reading material is adopted from reading comprehension in CET-4 with marginal glosses of 10 target words.Four classes are divided into two groups,Group 1 consists of Class 4 and Class 5,whose tasks are reading and blank-filling,reading and sentence-translating,both with the same involvement load of 2;Group 2 consists of Class 7 and Class 8,whose tasks are reading and sentence-making,reading and summary-writing,both with the same involvement load of 3.With the arrangement of subjects' English teachers,students should complete the immediate vocabulary test as soon as they finish the reading tasks.After a week,they have to do the delayed vocabulary test.All the data collected in two vocabulary tests will be input into the computer,and will be dealt with SPSS 19.0.Descriptive analysis,Independent-Samples T-test,Paired-Samples T-test,and one-way ANOVA will be adopted to analyze.Besides,the study set a questionnaire survey and an interview.The data are listed in an Excel sheet.And the information recorded in the interview will be transcribed by the author.The major findings in this study are as follows:1.There exists no significant difference between the reading tasks with different involvement loads on the immediate incidental vocabulary acquisition.While in vocabulary retention,there exists significant difference between the reading tasks.In general,the larger the amount of the involvement load is,the better the results of vocabulary retention will be;2.There exists no significant difference between the reading tasks with the same involvement load on incidental vocabulary acquisition;but in general,the task to make sentences after reading reached the best effect of incidental vocabulary acquisition,followed by summary-writing after reading,sentence-translating after reading and blank-filling after reading;3.There exists no significant difference between the reading tasks with different involvement loads on incidental vocabulary acquisition of senior high school students with different language proficiency levels.Regardless of the language proficiency level,the tasks with larger involvement load induced better effect of incidental vocabulary acquisition.To the tasks with the same involvement load,the higher-level students generally outperformed the lower-level students.For higher-level students,making sentences is helpful,for lower-level students,making sentences and writing summaries are both helpful.In the sentence-making task,the higher-level students performed the best on both immediate vocabulary acquisition and vocabulary retention,while lower-level students performed best in vocabulary retention.As to the summary-writing task,the lower-level students performed the best in the immediate vocabulary acquisition,the performance of higher-level students only stood in medium;4.As to students' current vocabulary learning situations and attitudes,senior high school students were still in a condition that they memorized by rote and were always feeling frustrating in the vocabulary memorization;they also thought the reading and its corresponding tasks might stimulate them to remember words.The study has certain practical implications.For teachers,they should arrange different reading tasks to students with different levels,help students consolidate the vocabulary knowledge students have learned,and perform comprehensive exercises;for students,they should foster the awareness of acquiring words incidentally through tasks,seek suitable learning approaches and forms,enlarge their vocabulary efficiently,and raise their language proficiency level.At last,the paper points out the limitations of the study,and gives relevant suggestion for future research.