A Study Of The Effects Of Involvement Load On Senior High School Students' English Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Through Visual-Audial Dual-Modality

Incidental vocabulary acquisition has been a research focus in the study of second language acquisition in recent years.Researchers have endeavored to explore how to realize incidental vocabulary acquisition and its influencing factors.The Involvement Load Hypothesis(ILH)proposed by Laufer and Hulstijn(2001)assumes that the higher-involvement-load task causes better incidental vocabulary acquisition.Many studies have been conducted to verify ILH,but the results are inconsistent.Some studies totally verify the hypothesis,and some just partially support it.In addition,reading is employed in most studies as the main input method to verify the hypothesis,and few studies are conducted on the effects of involvement load on incidental vocabulary acquisition through visual-audial dual-modality.Thus,it needs further research.Based on the Involvement Load Hypothesis(ILH),the Theory of Depth of Processing and the Four-Component Model of Working Memory,the present study endeavors to research the effects of the involvement load on Senior High School students' English IVA through visual-audial dual-modality,aiming to answer two research questions:1)Through the visual-audial dual-modality,what are the effects ofthe identical-involvement-load tasks on IVA of senior high school students?2)Through the visual-audial dual-modality,what are the effects of different-involvement-loads tasks on IVA of senior high school students?The participants of this study are from four intact classes in a senior high school in Changsha city.After reading-while-listening to the article,the four classes of students complete four different tasks: Gap-Filling with Glossary,Gap-Filling without Glossary,Sentence-Translation without Glossary and Sentence-Making with Glossary.The immediate post-test is performed immediately after the task is completed;the first delayed post-test is completed one week later,and the second delayed post-test is completed four weeks later.In order to ensure the credibility of the experiment,the students of the four classes participate in the experiment at the same time.After eliminating the invalid data,the data of 100 students are collected,that is,data of 25 students for each group.The content of the three post-tests is identical but the word order is different.With the help of SPSS 21.0,the data is analyzed after the experiment.The main findings in the present study are as follows:1)Through the visual-audial dual-modality,the identical-involvement-load tasks with identical index distribution do not necessarily lead to the same effect on IVA due to the different depths of processing;theidentical-involvement-load tasks with different involvement index distributions do not produce the same effect on IVA due to the different effects of involvement indexes and the different depths of processing.2)Through the visual-audial dual-modality,in terms of different-involvement-loads tasks,the task with strong “Evaluation” has a better IVA effect when other indexes are the same.Since the effect of the visual-audial dual-modality weakens the effect of the index “Search”,low-involvement-load tasks promote more IVA than high-involvement-load tasks.This research can help teachers set up tasks to carry out vocabulary teaching effectively,and it may also be conducive to students' vocabulary learning.Constrained by the small sample size,the comparatively low proficiency level of the subjects and the limited personal ability,the study still has some limitations.