A Study Of The Effects Of Involvement Load And Input Enhancement On Senior High School Students' Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

This thesis mainly studies the effect of involvement load and input enhancement on senior high school students' incidental English reading vocabulary acquisition.‘Involvement Load Hypothesis' was put forward by Laufer and Hulstijn(2001a),which has combined vocabulary acquisition with the study of language skills.And they carried out empirical research through designing three different reading tasks to verify the validity of the hypothesis.‘Input Enhancement Hypothesis' was originally proposed by Sharwood(1991)whose results showed that input enhancement can indeed promote vocabulary acquisition.On one hand,the research subjects in this field are mainly focused on college students and lack of attention to senior high school students.On the other hand,the involvement load and input enhancement can affect students' acquisition of the vocabulary incidentally to some extent.However,the researchers only studied one of the variables individually,not taking into account of the effect of reading tasks that combined different amount of involvement load with different forms of input enhancement on incidental vocabulary acquisition.This thesis examines the effect of different amount of involvement load and different forms of input enhancement on senior high school students' English reading vocabulary incidental acquisition.Therefore,this thesis mainly studies the following issues based on the Involvement Load Hypothesis and Input Enhancement Theory.1)When the involvement loads are the same,what are the immediate and delayed effects of different input enhancements on senior high school students' acquisition of incidental vocabulary? 2)When the input enhancements are the same,what are the immediate and delayed effects of different involvement loads on senior high school students' acquisition of incidental vocabulary? In this study,188 students from a rural senior high school in Xinhua County,Loudi City were used as the research subjects.This study designed three different post-reading tasks,which were randomly assigned to 9 groups of students according to the tasks of different amount of involvement load and different forms of input enhancement.The vocabulary knowledge five-level scale(VKS)was used to test effects of the incidental acquisition and retention of the 10 target words after different groups of subjects finished the reading tasks.All the collected data were analyzed by SPSS(21.0).The research findings in this thesis are as follows: 1)When the involvement loads are the same,the effects of incidental vocabulary acquisition and retention of the reading tasks with annotations are significantly better than the other two input enhancement forms while the effects of boldness and underlining on vocabulary acquisition are not much different.2)When the input enhancements are the same,the higher amount of the involvement load,the better the effect of incidental vocabulary acquisition and retention.The results of this study prove that the ‘Involvement LoadHypothesis' is also applicable to senior high school students,and that the‘Involvement Load Hypothesis' is also valid in different forms of input enhancement.Therefore,teachers should try to design reading tasks of higher involvement load to encourage students to connect target words with other knowledge in practical teaching,so that students can process target words more deeply during the reading process,and obtain better vocabulary acquisition and retention.