An Empirical Study Of The Effects Of Post-Reading Activities On High School Students' Incidental English Vocabulary Acquisition

Vocabulary is the element of language while vocabulary acquisition is the core task of L2 learning.The current classroom vocabulary teaching is generally focused and intentional.When students enter high schools,they have already possessed a certain vocabulary ability,and intentional vocabulary teaching cannot further meet the requirements of students' vocabulary development.Thus,incidental vocabulary acquisition has become an inevitable path to further expand students' vocabulary knowledge.During the reading process,teachers often provide a series of reinforcement activities after reading to enhance students' effects of incidental vocabulary acquisition.Here comes a critical question: which kind of reinforcement activity can more effectively promote students' incidental vocabulary acquisition?Based on Laufer and Hulstijn's Involvement Load Hypothesis and the Depth of Processing Theory,four post-reading activities with different involvement loads--gap-filling,retelling,discussion as well as continuation were designed in this study to explore their effects on high school students' incidental English vocabulary acquisition in an attempt to answer the following three major questions:1)Do different types of post-reading activities affect high school students' incidental English vocabulary acquisition?2)What effects do post-reading activities with different involvement loads have on high school students' incidental English vocabulary acquisition?3)When the involvement load is the same,which type of post-reading activities can make students acquire more vocabulary knowledge?In view of this,45 students from an intact class of Grade Two in Anqing Shihua No.1School were selected as research subjects in this study,and a 10-week teaching experiment was conducted.After completing each of the four post-reading activities,the subjects were given an immediate and delayed vocabulary test without being informed in advance to investigate their incidental vocabulary acquisition in terms of breadth and depth.The data were processed and analyzed by SPSS 26.0 software,including descriptive statistics,one-way ANOVA,and independent samples t-test.The results show that: 1)Different types of post-reading activities indeed had significantly different effects on high school students' incidental vocabulary acquisition.In the immediate test,subjects obtained the highest VLT mean score for retelling and the lowest for discussion as well as the highest VKS mean score for continuation and the lowest for discussion.No significant difference was found in all delayed tests.2)When the involvement loads were different,the significant difference existed only between discussion and continuation in both VLT and VKS immediate test while no significant difference was found in all delayed tests;3)When the amount of involvement load was the same,there was a significant difference between gap-filling and discussion as well as retelling and continuation in VLT immediate test.And no significant difference was found in all delayed tests.This study partially supports the Involvement Load Hypothesis,demonstrating the important effects of types and workload of post-reading activities on students' incidental vocabulary acquisition.This empirical study suggests that teachers should optimize the design of post-reading activities,consolidate in time to maintain the effects of vocabulary acquisition as well as provide a large variety of interesting reading materials to motivate students in their vocabulary acquisition with proper language scaffolding.