A Study On The Impact Of Different Reading Tasks On English Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Of High School Students

Based on Laufer & Hulstijn’s(2001)“Involvement Load Hypothesis”,some scholars have proposed that incidental vocabulary acquisition in foreign languages is affected by the form of post-reading tasks.That is,when other factors are the same,the higher the amount of input the teacher gives to the task,the better the effect of incidental vocabulary acquisition made by students.Many subsequent studies tried to test the validity of this hypothesis,but some experiments only partially support this hypothesis,so it is necessary to further explore the impact of task input on incidental vocabulary acquisition.As we all know,in the current middle school English classroom teaching,students mainly acquire second language through reading.Reading can not only increase students’ vocabulary,but also promote students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition.Therefore,what kinds of reading tasks and how to design reading tasks to enable high school students to obtain the best results in incidental English vocabulary acquisition are worthy of further research.This study designed two post-reading tasks(choosing words to fill in the blanks and using target words to make sentences)to explore the impact of different types of reading tasks on high school students’ English vocabulary acquisition.The purpose of this study answered the following two research questions,(1)Between the two reading tasks of blank-filling and sentence-writing,which is more conducive to incidental vocabulary acquisition in immediate vocabulary post-test?(2)Between the two reading tasks of blank-filling and sentence-writing,which is more conducive to incidental vocabulary acquisition in delayed vocabulary post-test?The students participating in this experiment are second-year high school students from two parallel classes.There is no significant difference in English proficiency between the two classes,and their vocabulary size is between 2000 and 2500.On the premise of ensuring that all students have similar background knowledge,they were divided into the blank-filling group and the sentence-writing group.After reading the same reading material,the two groups of students were asked different post-reading tasks:choosing words to fill in the blanks and target words to make sentences.After reading the same reading material,the two groups of students were asked to finish different post-reading tasks: choosing words to fill in the blanks and using target words to make sentences.Subsequently,the target vocabulary mastery level of all students was tested as the result of the immediate test,and a delayed test was performed two weeks later.The experiment was carried out four times in a four-week cycle,and each time a different article was selected and different target words were selected.In each cycle,the pretest was implemented in the first week,the immediate post-test was implemented in the second week,and the delayed post-test was implemented in the fourth week.Through the processing and analysis of the experimental data,this study draws the following conclusions: first of all,in the incidental vocabulary acquisition,students who have completed the task of sentence-making with the target words obtain better results in the immediate post-test;At the same time,in the delayed post-test of vocabulary level,the students who used the target words to construct sentences had a higher level of vocabulary incidental acquisition than those who filled in the blanks.The main findings of this study can enlighten Senior High School English teacher to find a more effective way to help learners acquire vocabulary.