A Study On The Effects Of Different Reading Task Types And Word Exposure Frequency On The Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition In Senior High School Students

Vocabulary is the cornerstone of language learning,so acquiring vocabulary effectively is the key for senior high school students to learn English.The concept of incidental vocabulary acquisition(IVA)has drawn wide attention from scholars both at home and abroad.However,there is no unified conclusion as to how many times a word should be exposed in order to ensure its acquisition.In addition,many studies show that different types of reading tasks also have different effects on incidental vocabulary acquisition.Laufer and Hulstijn(2001)proposed"The Involvement Load Hypothesis",which claims that the more involvement load a task contains,the better is the incidental vocabulary acquisition.Based on the theory of Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition and the Involvement Load Hypothesis(ILH),this article aims to investigate the influence of different reading tasks,the word occurrence frequency and their interactive effect on immediate vocabulary acquisition and word retention for senior high school students.The subjects in this study were grade 11 students from two parallel classes of a senior middle school in Shenzhen.In the process of experiment,students in Class A were required to finish a sentence-translation task with target words after reading a passage while students in Class B were required to complete a gap-filling task after reading the same text.Target words were divided into 3 groups which occurred for 2-3 times,4-5 times and 6-7 times respectively.The same immediate target words test was carried out in both Classes after they finish the reading tasks.Two weeks later,the delayed target words test was conducted.Afterwards,the data of immediate and delayed target words tests were input into the computer and analyzed through SPSS 17.0.According to the analysis of data,some conclusions will be drawn as follows:firstly,the subjects do have acquired vocabulary incidentally through completing reading tasks(the average score of Class A and Class B is 6.98 and 6.68 respectively in the immediate test,and it is 6.45 and 5.66 respectively in the delayed test;the total scores of immediate test and delayed test are both 9 points;before the experiment,90%students do not know the meanings of the target words).Secondly,word exposure frequency exerts an impact on the acquisition of words.In the same task type,the more frequent the learner encounters a word,the better effect of immediate vocabulary acquisition and word retention will be(in both the immediate and delayed test,Sig.(between 2-3 and 6-7 exposure groups in Class A and Class B=.000<.05).Although there is no significant difference in immediate vocabulary acquisition between groups of 4-5 and 6-7 exposure frequency(in the immediate test,Sig of Class A=.438>.05;Sig of Class B=.550>.05),it is essential for students to encounter a word for at least 6-7times to get a better word retention effect(in the delayed test,Sig(between 4-5 and 6-7 exposure groups in Class A=.023<.05;Sig(between 4-5 and 6-7 exposure groups in Class B=.008<.05).Thirdly,different reading tasks can yield different effects on word retention in the delayed test(p=.020<.05).However,no significant difference was found in immediate test between two reading tasks(p=.288>.05).Finally,no interactive effect was found between reading task and word occurrence frequency both in immediate(Sig.(task type_*word frequency)=.990>.05)and delayed word test(Sig(task type_*word frequency)=.787>.05).Besides,6-7 times'encounter and translation task reached the best immediate IVA and vocabulary retention result.Based on the above conclusions,some pedagogical implication been made as follows:to begin with,the teacher should guide and encourage students to do extensive reading in their spare time so as to promote incidental vocabulary acquisition.Furthermore,book compilers need to mediate the exposure frequency of novel words in a text so as to enable students to learn as many words as possible.It is necessary for teachers to well arrange tasks and review to achieve the best contact frequency of new words so as to achieve the best word retention effect.Finally,since translation task is outperformed gap-filling task in the delayed test,teachers could use translation task properly than gap-filling task to ensure students'IVA if time and other conditions are permitted.