| Vocabulary plays an important role in English learning.The volume of vocabulary can directly affect students' listening,speaking,reading and writing abilities.Nowadays,intentional acquisition is still the major approach to vocabulary acquisition.However,the effectiveness of incidental vocabulary acquisition(IVA)has been confirmed by many scholars at home and abroad.Besides,many factors affecting IVA have been discussed by researchers.Among the factors,the influence of text intervention on IVA has been a hot topic for researchers at home and abroad.As for text intervention,studies on input enhancement and task load involvement occupy a large proportion.Firstly,the positive effects of input enhancement on learners' IVA have been confirmed by researchers.Many domestic scholars have found that input enhancement and task load involvement can attract learners' attention.However,some researchers have questioned that“Involvement Load Hypothesis” is not always applicable to IVA.Secondly,input enhancement has positive effects on IVA,but there are few in-depth studies to explore which kind of enhancement is the best.Finally,whether there are different effects on the acquisition of different parts of speech in reading discourse remains to be investigated.In this study,quantitative and qualitative research methods are used to explore the effects of input enhancement and task load involvement on IVA for non-English majors.In addition,whether there are differences in the acquisition of different parts of speech or not among learners without input enhancement and task load involvement.In a nutshell,this study mainly focuses on the following three questions:(1)Does input enhancement affect IVA? Specifically,do italicization and underlining affect IVA? If so,which enhancement method is better?(2)Does task load involvement affect IVA? The specific question is: Do different tasks after reading exert an impact on IVA?(3)Is there different effectiveness of incidental acquisition on different parts of speech? Specifically,which part of speech can be better acquired incidentally?The subjects of the three experiments are non-English major freshmen from four parallel classes in Economic and Technical College of Anhui Agricultural University in Anhui Province.Subjects in the four classes have the similar proficiency level,years of English learning and gender proportion.In Experiment One,two classes read the material without input enhancement,while the other two classes read italicization enhanced material and underlining enhanced material respectively.In Experiment Two,two classes complete low involvement load task after reading and the other two classes finish high involvement load task.In Experiment Three,the four classes read non-prominent materials and do not need to complete tasks after reading.In the above three experiments,the subjects are required to finish vocabulary tests immediately after the reading tasks.Three delayed post-tests are conducted a week later and all target words are not changed but with different order.The thesis makes use of SPSS 19.0 and adopts quantitative and qualitative analysis methods to analyze the data.The major findings are as follows: input enhancement has a significant effect on IVA in a short term;input enhancement arouses students' attention on target words;the difference of the effects of underlining and italicization on IVA is not remarkable;task load involvement significantly affects IVA in a short term;as for different parts of speech,the results of IVA are not always the same.“Involvement Load Hypothesis” and “Noticing Hypothesis” can make contributions to IVA.Teachers can learn to devise different tasks to promote IVA.What's more,input enhancement such as underlining can also be applied to reading material. |
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