Reading Tasks With Varied Involvement Load On Receptive And Productive Vocabulary Incidental Acquisition Of Senior High School Students

Vocabulary is an important part of a kind of language.Both first language learners and second language learners place vocabulary learning in the most prominent position.Thus,for teachers,especially second language teachers,how to teach vocabulary well have become a top priority task.It is found that reading is an appropriate way to learn vocabulary.Therefore,it is necessary to do some research on vocabulary learning through reading.At present,there are some problems in vocabulary teaching.Foreign language teachers are always trapped in a tight spot.On the one hand,teachers want to teach vocabulary as much as possible so that students can learn more vocabulary.On the other hand,due to the limited teaching time,teachers can not put all their energy and time into vocabulary teaching.Teachers should pay attention to both teaching processes and teaching achievements.Therefore,incidental vocabulary acquisition has entered the field of vocabulary teaching.With the development of incidental vocabulary acquisition,some theories about incidental vocabulary acquisition emerge,including the involvement load hypothesis proposed by Laufer and Hulstijn.The involvement load hypothesis means that tasks with higher involvement load can promote the incidental vocabulary acquisition better than that with lower involvement load.Based on the involvement load hypothesis,the current research investigates the effect of reading tasks with varied involvement load on receptive vocabulary and productive vocabulary.Then the author raises the related research questions:1.How do reading tasks with varied involvement load affect receptive vocabulary acquisition in immediate vocabulary test and delayed vocabulary test?2.How do reading tasks with varied involvement load affect productive vocabulary acquisition in immediate vocabulary test and delayed vocabulary test?3.What results do reading tasks with varied involvement load contribute to receptive and productive vocabulary acquisition?In the current research,pretest and post-test experimental design are used.Two natural classes are secondary students from senior high school.There are 48 students in one class and 49 students in the other.The average age of the two classes is 17 years old.The two classes are randomly assigned to two groups.The one group is to answer questions after reading the material,and the other group is to fill in the blanks after reading the material.The two groups receive immediate post-test and delayed post-test respectively after completing the task.At the end of the experiment,12 students from the two groups,who belong to the high,medium and low achievements groups,are interviewed by the author.In this research?both quantitative and qualitative methods are used to test the effect of incidental vocabulary acquisition.The experiment includes experimental method,scale measurement and interview.After data collection,the author uses SPSS.17.0 software to test the significance by independent sample t-test.In addition,qualitative software analysis method NVivo 10 is used to analyze qualitative data to find out the reasons supporting the quantitative research results and to excavate students' views on vocabulary learning through reading and suggestions for future implementation.Major findings can be summarized as follows:1.Reading tasks with higher involvement load are better than those with lower involvement load of the receptive vocabulary acquisition in the immediate test.In the delayed test,reading tasks with higher involvement load are no better than those with lower involvement load of receptive vocabulary acquisition.But all task groups produce incidental vocabulary acquisition.2.Reading tasks with varied involvement load have no significant difference in productive vocabulary tests,either immediate or delayed.But all task groups produce incidental vocabulary acquisition.3.The mean of receptive vocabulary is higher than that of productive vocabulary in all task groups,which confirms that receptive vocabulary is easier to learn than productive vocabulary,and have no relation to the involvement load.Neither receptive vocabulary nor productive vocabulary has a significant effect on vocabulary retention in the delayed test,which indicates that involvement load hypothesis is not very effective for long-term vocabulary retention.In brief,we can know that different reading tasks have different effects on receptive vocabulary acquisition in immediate and delayed vocabulary test.Different reading tasks do not produce different effects on productive vocabulary both in immediate and delayed vocabulary test.The receptive vocabulary is easier to learn for learners than productive vocabulary,two kinds of vocabulary in delayed test do not have good retention.After analyzing the experimental data,the author puts forward some suggestions on the application of incidental vocabulary acquisition and involvement load hypothesis in English teaching according to the experimental conclusions,hoping to provide some help for practical teaching.