The Effects Of Task Involvement Load And Task Types On Senior High School Students' Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

Vocabulary acquisition is vital to English learning.However,most senior high school students only memorize new words by rote using the vocabulary lists.It is very inefficient because sufficient contexts are not provided.After Nagy put forward the ?Incidental vocabulary acquisition?,more and more linguists tried to explore the ways to better promote learners' incidental vocabulary acquisition.Accomplishing tasks after reading has been proved to be an effective way to promote students' incidental vocabulary acquisition.Laufer & Hulstijn(2001)then put forward the ?Involvement Load Hypothesis?,which claims that tasks with higher involvement load could better promote learners' incidental vocabulary acquisition than tasks with lower involvement load when other factors are equal.After that,many studies were conducted trying to testify the validity of the hypothesis.But some experiments just partially support the hypothesis,so there is a necessity to further explore the effect of task involvement load on IVA.Moreover,many researchers suggest that it is necessary to explore the effects of different reading task types(input tasks vs.output tasks)on students' incidental vocabulary acquisition.Based on ?Input Hypothesis?,the ?Depth of Processing Theory?,the ?Involvement Load Hypothesis?,and ?Output Hypothesis?,the present research designed four tasks(Reading comprehensive questions,Translating,Meaning-match and Sentence-making)to probe into the effects of task involvement load and task types(input tasks vs.output tasks)on senior high school students' incidental vocabulary acquisition.The current study aims to answer three questions:(1)For tasks of the same type,do tasks with higher involvement load lead to better immediate vocabulary acquisition and delayed vocabulary retention results than tasks with lower involvement load?(2)For tasks with the same involvement load,which task type leads to better immediate vocabulary acquisition and delayed vocabulary retention results,receptive tasks or productive tasks?(3)Does the impact of task involvement load and task types on students' incidental vocabulary acquisition interact with each other? The subjects of this experiment were 100 senior two students from two intact classes in Qin'an No.1 Middle School.The experiment lasted for three weeks.The subjects were divided into four groups using the stratified sampling method.There was no significant difference in their English proficiency among the four groups.All the subjects were required to read the same article within certain time,and then each group accomplished different reading tasks.After completing the reading tasks,the subjects were asked to finish an Immediate Vocabulary Test immediately and a Delayed Vocabulary Test one week later to investigate their acquisition of ten target words.The data collected in this experiment were analyzed by SPSS 22.0.Then conclusions were drawn as follows:(1)For tasks of the same type,tasks with higher involvement load lead to better immediate vocabulary acquisition and delayed vocabulary retention results than tasks with lower involvement load.The results support the Involvement Load Hypothesis: tasks with higher involvement load result in better incidental vocabulary acquisition and retention when other factors are equal.(2)Compared with receptive tasks,productive tasks with the same involvement load better promote learners' delayed vocabulary retention.That is to say,task-induced involvement is not the determining factor which affects incidental vocabulary acquisition.Task types can also affect incidental vocabulary acquisition to some degree and productive tasks are more conductive to incidental vocabulary acquisition than receptive tasks.(3)There is no interactive effect between the impact of task involvement load and task types on learners' incidental vocabulary acquisition.At last,the thesis summarizes the major findings and provides some pedagogical implications for English vocabulary teaching in senior high school.The limitations of this study and the suggestions for the future research are also presented.