The Effects Of Task Types And English Proficiency On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Of High School Students

In recent years,many scholars have made a lot of researches on incidental vocabulary acquisition from different perspectives,but few studies choose high school students as participants and focus on the effect of different English proficiency on learners' vocabulary acquisition.Therefore,the purpose of this thesis is to explore the effects of different task types and English proficiency on incidental vocabulary acquisition of high school students.This thesis focuses on the following two research questions(1)Are there any effects of English proficiency on incidental vocabulary gain and retention? If yes,what are they?(2)Are there any effects of task types with different involvement load on incidental vocabulary gain and retention? If yes,what are they?63 senior one students were chosen as participants from No.7 High School in Yuzhong County,Gansu province in the present study.According to their scores of senior high school entrance examination,the participants were divided into high English proficiency group and low English proficiency group,and then the students in both groups were randomly divided into three subgroups respectively.After that,they were asked to complete the three different tasks with different involvement load.The three tasks with different involvement load were designed based on an expository passage.The passage contained 10 target words selected by conducting a pilot study.Task 1---participants read texts with the glosses of the target words after the passages and do the comprehension questions;Task 2---the participants read passage and fill in the blanks by selecting proper words from target words list in the end of the passage;Task 3---participants read the passage and write a short article with 10 target words.After they finished the tasks,the VKS(Vocabulary Knowledge Scale)designed by Paribakht and Wesche(1997)was used to test their vocabulary acquisition immediately and three weeks later.After collecting data by Excel 2011,SPSS 17.0 for windows was used to analyze the data.The main findings were as follows:(1)English proficiency had significant effects on both vocabulary gain and retention.Both low and high English proficiency students could acquire vocabulary incidentally by doing reading tasks.The higher English proficiency the students had,the better they acquired vocabulary.(2)There were significant effects of task types with different involvement load on incidental vocabulary gain and retention.And among the three tasks,writing a composition was more effective than doing comprehensive questions and gap-filling.(3)There was no significant interactive effect of English proficiency and task types on incidental vocabulary acquisition.(4)With the lapse of time,the vocabulary students at both English proficiency acquired from the three tasks was significantly reduced.In short,the study makes a further enrichment and development of the empirical study of incidental vocabulary acquisition,and also has important implications for high school English vocabulary teaching.However,there are some limitations in this study.Firstly,the current study only examined the effect of task types on incidental vocabulary acquisition,but didn't take the motivational and cognitive component of involvement load into full consideration;secondly,The test only involved one aspect of the word knowledge--word meaning;thirdly,the scores of one examination could not decide the participants' real English proficiency;finally,this study only discussed acquiring the vocabulary incidentally by reading.Therefore,the future research can study vocabulary incidental acquisition from listening,speaking,writing skills.