| Vocabulary is the basis of language skill learning.Meanwhile,the development of language skill is also an important approach to vocabulary acquisition.Therefore,how to improve the efficiency of vocabulary acquisition in the process of developing language skills has always been a hot issue for foreign language teachers and researchers.Incidental vocabulary acquisition refers to a process in which learners acquire vocabulary incidentally while undertaking other learning tasks without having an eye on vocabulary(Laufer 1998).Drawing on “involvement load hypothesis”,researchers combined language skill training with incidental vocabulary acquisition in order to investigate how to promote incidental vocabulary acquisition through changing the amount of involvement load of training tasks.Nevertheless,the current studies in this filed are mainly focused on college students,showing less concern for middle school students.In high schools of China,more attention is being paid to developing students' reading ability,and the ability to obtain information,process information,analyze and solve problems in English.Reading is not only a basic language skill,but also an important part of English learning for high school students.Therefore,the present study,focusing on Chinese senior high school EFL learners,seeks to exam the effects of reading tasks varying in involvement load on learners' incidental vocabulary acquisition by combining high school English reading with incidental vocabulary acquisition.This study intends to explore an efficient way of “learn in reading” for English vocabulary teaching in senior high school.A combination of quantitative and qualitative methods is used in this study.Drawing on “involvement load hypothesis”,four reading tasks varying in involvement load and in the components are designed.Task one is answering questions,the involvement load being 1+;Task two is filling gaps,the involvement load being 2+;Task three is filling gaps with dictionaries,the involvement load being 3+;Task four is writing original sentences,having the same amount of involvement load with Task three but differing from Task three in components.120 senior high school students in 4 groups were required to undertake different reading tasks and then to complete the immediate and delayed post-tests of incidental vocabulary acquisition.The collected data are statistically analyzed by the use of descriptive statistics,one-way ANOVA,independent-samples t test and paired-samples t test in SPSS20.0 software.Combined with the results of the interview,the findings are as follows:Firstly,the reading tasks differing in their involvement load had a significant influence on both immediate and delayed incidental vocabulary acquisition.Generally speaking,tasks with higher involvement load are more effective than tasks with lower involvement load in promoting incidental vocabulary acquisition.Secondly,the two tasks with the same amount of involvement load but different distribution of the components involved did not have a significant influence on immediate incidental vocabulary acquisition,but have a significant influence on delayed incidental vocabulary acquisition.The effect of “evaluation” is stronger than that of “search” in the delayed post-tests.Thirdly,there are significant differences between the immediate incidental vocabulary acquisition and delayed incidental vocabulary acquisition for each task.The results of the four immediate post-tests are all significantly better than those of the delayed post-tests.It means neither of the four tasks has ideal effect on vocabulary retention.Task three with the highest involvement load had the weakest effect on vocabulary retention.The above findings verified the “involvement load hypothesis” partly and demonstrate the crucial impact of reading task involvement load on incidental vocabulary acquisition for senior high school students.This suggests that to improve vocabulary acquisition efficiency teachers should consciously change the involvement load in reading tasks to help students acquire vocabulary incidentally while training their language skills.Moreover,revision and rehearsal in time of the newly-acquired vocabulary for students are strongly needed to yield better retention with conscious guidance of teachers.This study provides new evidence for second language incidental vocabulary acquisition and sheds new light for high school English teaching.In future research,researchers can further explore the incidental vocabulary acquisition of English learners at all levels,and adopt more research methods to provide more sufficient evidence for incidental vocabulary acquisition and “involvement load hypothesis”. |
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