The Effect Of Reading Tasks With Different Involvement Load On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition In Senior High School Students

Vocabulary is an important part of English learning.Enlarging vocabulary is an important way to improve English proficiency for senior high school students.In recent years,incidental vocabulary acquisition has attracted the attention of many scholars.Incidental vocabulary acquisition is an implicit vocabulary learning.For example,students incidentally acquire the words when they read English,communicate with others and listen to English songs.Studies have shown that incidental vocabulary acquisition in reading is one of the effective ways to acquire vocabulary.Therefore,this study attempts to explore the effect of reading tasks with different involvement load on incidental vocabulary acquisition in senior high school students.Based on the involvement load hypothesis,105 high school students were selected as subjects to complete different reading tasks.It included reading comprehension,reading comprehension plus fill-in,reading comprehension plus sentence making.The subjects were divided into three groups.Each group had 35 students.Then ten target words were tested in immediate vocabulary test and post-vocabulary test.This study contained three research questions:(1)Can reading tasks with different involvement load affect the immediate incidental vocabulary acquisition in senior high school students?(2)Can reading tasks with different involvement load affect the delayed incidental vocabulary retention in senior high school students?(3)Among the three reading tasks,which task has the best effect on incidental vocabulary acquisition of senior high school students?The results showed that:(1)reading tasks with different involvement load can affect the incidental vocabulary acquisition.The result of the immediate test showed that students in reading comprehension plus fill-in and reading comprehension plus sentence making group performed significantly better vocabulary acquisition than students in reading comprehension group.But there was no significant difference between the first two groups.(2)the post-test indicated that different tasks of involvement load led to the difference in vocabulary retention effect.The greater the involvement load,the better the incidental vocabulary acquisition.The post-test scores of the three groups were significantly lower than those of the immediate results.It meant that the effect of vocabulary retention was significantly influenced by time factors.(3)the task of reading comprehension plus sentence making with the highest involvement load showed a better acquisition effect than the other two tasks in both the immediate and post-vocabulary tests.This study revealed the effect of different reading tasks on incidental vocabulary acquisition in senior high school students.The author put forward some feasible suggestions and references for vocabulary teaching.For example,teachers can promote students' incidental vocabulary acquisition by designing reading tasks with different involvement load for students.In addition,students should combine intentional vocabulary acquisitionwith incidental vocabulary acquisition to promote vocabulary learning.Of course,there were some limitations in this study.For example,the number of subjects was too small,the test time was too short,the target words and the reading materials were too small.In future research,it needs to be further improved.