| Vocabulary is the foundation of English proficiency,and the accumulation of vocabulary is an important task in English learning.Then,how to acquire a large number of vocabulary has become one of the difficulties in learning English.Since 2003,incidental vocabulary acquisition has gradually become a hot topic in the field of English teaching in China.However,most of the empirical studies on incidental vocabulary acquisition focus on testing college students at home and abroad,and few of them concentrate on senior high school students.What's more,most of the research contents is to discuss the factors that restrict the incidental vocabulary acquisition.This study will combine the reading task-induced involvement with vocabulary level,and take the theory of depth of processing,the involvement load hypothesis,the input hypothesis as the theoretical basics to explore incidental vocabulary acquisition of senior high school students.In this study,300 students are selected as the research subjects from three top classes and three ordinary classes in Senior Two in a middle school in Fujian Province.According to the pretest scores of vocabulary,the classes are divided into a high-level group and a low-level group.The researcher selects two extracurricular reading texts,which is suitable for the study,and determines the target words by retrieving corpus.Different reading tasks are designed respectively for the two groups.Task one is reading comprehension multiple choice,the involvement load being 1;Task two is filling in the blanks with target words,the involvement load being 2;Task three is making sentences with targets,the involvement load being 3.Vocabulary test is conducted immediately after the completion of the task.The study is trying to explore the following three questions:(1)Is there an effect of task-induced involvement on incidental vocabulary acquisition of senior high school students?(2)Is there an effect of vocabulary level on incidental vocabulary acquisition of senior high school students?(3)Does the task-induced involvement interact with the vocabulary level on incidental vocabulary acquisition of senior high school students? If so,what is the interaction?The results reveal that:(1)No matter the low or high level group,sentence making task has the highest average score on vocabulary test,followed by filling up task,and the lowest mean score is the reading comprehension task.Moreover,the mean difference probabilities of the three tasks are all less than 0.05,reaching a very high significance level.(2)In the three reading tasks with different task-induced involvement,the scores of the high-level group are higher than those of the low-level group,and the probability of significant difference between the high-level group and the low-level group is less than 0.05,which indicates the difference is significant.(3)The significant value of the interaction between the task-induced involvement and vocabulary level in vocabulary test scores is 0.000,less than 0.05,showing a significant difference,which indicates that task-induced involvement and vocabulary level have a significant interactive effect on incidental vocabulary acquisition of senior high school students.Moreover,in terms of the high-level group,the difference between the scores of the three types of tasks fluctuates steadily,while in terms of the test scores of the low-level group,the difference between the gap filling with the higher task-induced involvement and the reading comprehension with the lowest task-induced involvement is larger than the difference between the sentence making and the gap filling,thus resulting in the interaction between the two factors.The following conclusions are drawn from the empirical research: The task-induced involvement has a significant effect on the incidental vocabulary acquisition.And the higher the task-induced involvement,the better the incidental vocabulary acquisition.The vocabulary level has a significant effect on the incidental vocabulary acquisition,and the higher the vocabulary level,the better the incidental vocabulary acquisition.This investigation supports the task-induced involvement hypothesis.The higher the task-induced involvement,the better the incidental vocabulary acquisition.Therefore,the English teachers should design reading exercises with high task-induced involvement in line with English proficiency to promote students' incidental vocabulary acquisition. |
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