| In the process of second language acquisition(SLA),vocabulary acquisition plays an important role.The mastery of lexical chunks knowledge has also become the key for junior middle school English learners in the language acquisition.At present,the study of incidental acquisition of lexical chunks has become a hot topic in the field of second language acquisition.However,the junior middle school students spend much time on learning vocabulary and lexical chunks,but the effect is not ideal.Thus,it is practical and realistic to explore more effective reading tasks to improve the effect of students’ incidental acquisition of lexical chunks.Based on the Input Hypothesis,Depth of Processing Theory and Involvement Load Hypothesis,through the combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods,the following two questions were mainly discussed:(1)What are the immediate effects of tasks with different involvement load on learners acquisition of lexical chunks through English reading?(2)What are the delayed effects of tasks with different involvement load on learner’s retention of lexical chunks through English reading?The subjects were 98 Grade One junior middle school students from two parallel classes in Lanzhou City,Gansu Province.This study mainly included pilot study and the main experiment.The 49 students’ task in the pilot study was to select target chunks and new words.The main experiment consisted of experimental treatment,immediate and delayed lexical chunks tests and interview.The other 49 students who participated in the main experiment were divided into three groups.After reading the same passage,each group was asked to complete a reading task with different involvement load: reading comprehension,reading comprehension plus cloze,and sentence translation.Then the immediate and delayed tests were conducted to probe the acquisition and retention of the 10 target lexical chunks.With the help of the software Statistical Package for Social Science(SPSS 20.0),One-way ANOVA,the Paired-Samples T-test and Post Hoc Multiple Comparisons were applied to analyze and process the data.The results indicated that:(1)All the three reading tasks with different involvement load can facilitate the incidental acquisition of lexical chunks.For the immediate test,students in sentence translation,reading comprehension plus cloze group achieved better than students in reading comprehension group.However,there was no significant difference between reading comprehension plus cloze and sentence translation.(2)Reading tasks with different involvement load had different effect on the delayed retention of lexical chunks.The higher the involvement load of reading tasks,the better the retention of lexical chunks.However,affected by the time factor,there was a significant decline in the retention of lexical chunks.3)The task with deeper processing of the lexical chunks(sentence translation)performed better than the other two in the immediate and delayed test as well as the interview.Based on the results of the present study,some feasible implications of how to improve learners’ incidental acquisition of lexical chunks can be put forward.Firstly,the teachers should make full use of reading materials in textbooks,test papers and extracurricular reading,and emphasize the high-frequency common lexical chunks in reading.At the same time,teachers should also encourage students accumulate more lexical chunks through extensive reading.Secondly,teachers are encouraged to design various reading tasks to motivate students’ deep processing of lexical chunks.Lastly,there are pros and cons to incidental acquisition of lexical chunks and intentional learning.Teachers can combine the two methods in practical teaching so as to achieve a better effect of incidental acquisition of lexical chunks. |
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