Effects Of Reading Task Involvement Load On Vocabulary Retention Among Senior High School Students

Vocabulary Incidental acquisition is an effective way for learners to solve vocabulary problems in second language acquisition.The Involvement Load Hypothesis theory proposed in 2001 quantified the abstract concept of cognitive input for the first time,and provided a measurement standard for task design.The effect of incidental vocabulary acquisition was explored by designing skills training tasks with different involvement loads,and the correlation between task involvement load and incidental vocabulary acquisition was proposed: the more the involvement loads,the better the effect of incidental vocabulary acquisition.However,with the deepening of researches,some scholars have questioned this result.Taking the theory of Involvement Load Hypothesis as the theory base,this paper focused on senior high school students.For senior high school students,reading is not only a basic language skill,but also an important part of learning with the largest proportion of test scores.Therefore,this study combined reading with incidental vocabulary acquisition,and further verified the Involvement Load Hypothesis through observing and analyzing the empirical research on effects of reading task involvement load on vocabulary retention among senior high school students,and made some exploration for the innovation of high school English vocabulary teaching.Three main research questions were as following:(1)What is the effect of reading task involvement load on the vocabulary retention in immediate test?(2)What is the effect of reading task involvement load on the vocabulary retention in delayed test?(3)What are the differences of vocabulary retention in immediate test and delayed test in each reading task?In this study,138 subjects came from three liberal arts classes in the first grade of Nanchang No.8 middle school in Jiangxi province.By comparing the mid-term grades of these three classes with the working memory,no significant difference was found.Therefore,it could be regarded as three parallel classes with the same English proficiency and working memory.Three classes were randomly assigned tasks.Each group was assigned a different task after reading the same article.Task 1(T/F comprehension,and involvement load was 2),task 2(blank-filling,and involvementload was 3),and task 3(sentence-making,and involvement load was 4).After completing the reading task,the vocabulary knowledge scale(VKS)was applied to conduct an immediate post-test on the mastery of 15 target words of the three groups of subjects,and a delayed post-test was conducted two weeks later.Then,SPSS 24.0 was applied to collate and analyze the collected data.The results were as follows:(1)Reading task involvement load had a significant impact on the immediate and delayed effects of incidental vocabulary acquisition.In the immediate test,the reading with T/F comprehension task was less effective than blank-filling and sentence-making in improving senior high school students' vocabulary achievement,but there was no significant difference between task 2 and task 3,which partially supported the Involvement Load Hypothesis.(2)In the delayed test,the effect of task 1 with the minimum involvement load was still the worst,but the effect of task 2 was better than that of task 3,which further proved that the hypothesis of input was correct in a limited range and needed further empirical verification.(3)In each reading task,the effect of immediate test and delayed test on vocabulary retention showed that the effect of delayed test was worse than that of immediate test,indicating that without timely review,it was difficult for vocabulary to produce ideal vocabulary retention effect.But the effect of the group was asked to do T/F comprehension task had no significant difference between the immediate test and delayed test,showing that the vocabulary acquisition rate was the lowest so as to the forgotten vocabulary was the least.The findings of this study provided both theoretical and pedagogical implications.Theoretically,the research results revealed that Involvement Load Hypothesis was supported partially.The root causing to partial support to the hypothesis maybe was that some aspects of the involvement load were difficult to quantify and manipulate,and the difficulty of the learner's attention to be manipulated.So,some advanced technology such as user-behaviour tracking technology and a theoretical framework containing more criterion such as Technique Feature Analysis(TFA)should be applied in this research field.Practically,some pedagogical implications was to enlighten.For English teachers,they can try this new method in vocabulary teaching,which was quite different from the traditional vocabulary teaching method.They could set the reading tasks more scientifically to promote the retention of students' vocabulary.According to the research results,the reading task was not more involvement load and more effective.The students' interest and attention must be captured by the task in order to facilitate target vocabulary processing.As for senior high school students in this study,maybethe original sentence making was too difficult to focus attention to the task.The blank-filling task was suitable for them.