Effects Of Three Reading-based Output Tasks On Senior High School Students’ Vocabulary Learning

It is well-known that vocabulary learning is critical to second language learning.Therefore,in the study of second language teaching,the study of vocabulary learning has become one of the focuses.Many scholars have studied the activities of learners after reading in order to find more efficient vocabulary learning tasks,since reading is a very essential way to learn vocabulary.Although a great deal of research supported the positive effects of reading-based output tasks on vocabulary learning,there is still an argument about which output task has the most significant effect.In addition,most of the post-reading tasks in previous studies are filling in blanks,making sentences and translating.Empirical studies on other forms of written tasks at the text level are relatively rare.Therefore,the study compares the effects of three readingbased output tasks on senior high school students’ vocabulary learning.The present study puts forward the following two research questions: 1)What are the effects of the three reading-based output tasks on senior high school students’ acquisition of target words? 2)What are the effects of the three reading-based output tasks on senior high school students’ retention of target words? To answer the above two questions,209 students of Grade two in a senior middle school were chosen as the participants in this study.Among them,189 students from four parallel classes took part in the main study,and 20 students from another parallel class participated the pilot study.The three reading-based output tasks were continuous writing(Group 1),summary writing(Group 2)and asking/answering questions(Group 3).The three tasks were allocated to three of the four classes randomly,and another class was the control group(Group 4).In the first week,students took part in the vocabulary pretest.In the second week,the main experiment began.Each group of students completed the reading and the corresponding tasks,and then participated in the immediate posttest without prior notice.Two weeks later,the students took the delayed posttest which was unexpected to them.Experimental data was collected and then the data was analyzed by SPSS software(version21.0).The following findings were revealed:1.The results of immediate posttest reveal that there were statistically significant differences between the effects of the three output tasks on learners’ vocabulary acquisition.The effect of continuous writing in vocabulary acquisition was better than those of the other two tasks,and the differences were statistically significant.The task of asking/answering questions was better than the task of summary writing.2.The results of delayed posttest indicate that the differences between the three tasks in promoting vocabulary retention were statistically significant.Compared with the other two tasks,continuation task was more effective in facilitating vocabulary retention.There was no statistically significant difference between the scores of summary writing group and those of asking/answering-questions group.Findings of the study proved that the three output tasks after reading all facilitated senior high school students’ vocabulary learning,especially the continuation task.Based on these findings,the study can provide some teaching implications for English teachers.