An Experimental Study On The Effects Of Different Reading-Based Output Tasks On Incidental English Vocabulary Acquisition Of Senior High School Students

Vocabulary is the basic foundation for the development of language skills.Incidental vocabulary acquisition,as one of the important methods of vocabulary learning,has become a hot research topic for English teachers and researchers.At present,a large number of studies at home and abroad have found that reading-based output tasks can effectively promote incidental vocabulary acquisition.However,most of the studies focus on comparing the effects of output tasks with input tasks or input enhancement tasks,and written output tasks with oral output tasks on incidental vocabulary acquisition;in terms of written output tasks,most of the studies compare the effects of reading-based blank-filling tasks,sentence writing tasks or composition tasks on incidental vocabulary acquisition,but few studies have compared the effects of the reading-based sentence translation task and sentence writing task on incidental vocabulary acquisition.This study,guided by the Output Hypothesis and the Involvement Load Hypothesis,aims to compare the effects of two different reading-based output tasks,namely the sentence translation task and the sentence writing task,on the incidental English vocabulary acquisition of senior high school students,and further compare their effects on the incidental English vocabulary acquisition of senior high school students at different English proficiency levels.This study mainly addresses the following two questions:(1)How does the reading-based sentence translation output task differ from the sentence writing one in terms of their effects on the incidental English vocabulary acquisition of senior high school students?(2)How does the reading-based sentence translation output task differ from the sentence writing one in terms of their effects on the incidental English vocabulary acquisition of senior high school students at different English proficiency levels?This study adopts an experimental method to study 105 students from two parallel classes in Grade Two of a senior high school in Meizhou,Guangdong.This study sets the class that completes the sentence translation output task as the sentence translation group,and the class that uses the target words to make sentences as the sentence writing group.The subjects in the two groups need to participate in two rounds of experiments.In each round of the experiment,the subjects are tested with the Vocabulary Knowledge Scale after the treatment and after one week to compare the incidental English vocabulary acquisition effects of students in the two experimental groups.The experimental data are put into SPSS 18.0 for descriptive analysis and the independent samples t-test.The study results show that in the two rounds of the immediate vocabulary post-tests and the delayed vocabulary post-tests:(1)The performance of the sentence writing group is significantly better than that of the sentence translation group.This shows that the sentence writing task is more effective than the sentence translation task in facilitating the incidental English vocabulary acquisition of senior high school students;(2)For senior high school students at different English proficiency levels,compared with the sentence translation task,the sentence writing task can better facilitate the incidental English vocabulary acquisition of high-level,middle-level,and low-level students,with middle-level and low-level students having the most significant effects of incidental English vocabulary acquisition.This study compares the effects of two different reading-based output tasks(sentence translation and sentence writing)on the incidental English vocabulary acquisition of senior high school students,providing new ideas for senior high school English teachers’ vocabulary teaching and senior high school students’ English vocabulary learning,as well as laying the foundation for further research in other directions in this field.