The Effects Of Output Tasks On Junior High School Students’ Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition In Reading:the Perspective Of Involvement Load Hypothesis

Vocabulary is the cornerstone of a language.In English language teaching,vocabulary has a significant impact on all aspects of listening,reading,writing and translating.In order to master a language,second language learners should have a certain amount of vocabulary.Therefore,how to help junior high school students master vocabulary has always been an important part of junior high school English teaching.The English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education(2022)state that learning vocabulary is more about understanding and using vocabulary in listening,speaking,reading,and writing activities.In order to improve second language learners’ incidental vocabulary acquisition in reading,researchers have designed different tasks based on the Involvement Load Hypothesis.Therefore,how to design tasks to improve the effectiveness of incidental vocabulary acquisition(IVA)has become an important topic of discussion among researchers.Based on the Involvement Load Hypothesis,Output Hypothesis and Depth of the Processing Theory,the study examines three main research questions:(1)What are the effects of output tasks on junior high school students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition in general?(2)What are the effects of different output tasks with the unequal involvement load on junior high school students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition?(3)What are the effects of different output tasks with the equal involvement load on junior high school students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition?The experimental participants of this study were students from a junior high school in Guangzhou.Before the experiment,students’ English scores of two parallel classes were collected and their vocabulary size was tested.According to the stratified sampling method,the students in the two classes were divided equally into four groups,named groups A,B,C and D respectively.There are 25 students in each group.During the experiment,participants read a narrative text containing 10 target words and answer three questions.Then,students in groups A,B and C were required to complete different output tasks with the involvement load of 2,2 and 3,while group D is the control group.After the experiment,Students in each group were given an immediate vocabulary test,and a delayed vocabulary test was given to the participants one week later.Data was collected from a total of 100 students in this study,i.e.25 participants from each group.The data from this study was analyzed by using SPSS(26.0).The main findings of this study were as follows:First of all,the output tasks improved the effect of students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition.After comparing the immediate vocabulary test scores of the four groups separately,the average scores of students in Group D were significantly lower than that of the three experimental groups,which indicates that the output tasks had an impact on learners’ immediate recall of vocabulary knowledge.Secondly,there were differences in the effects of different output tasks with unequal involvement load on the incidental vocabulary acquisition.In the immediate vocabulary test,the task with the involvement load of 3 was significantly different from the other two tasks with the involvement load of 2.This is because the task with an involvement load of 3 not only contained need and assessment factors,but the assessment induced by this task was a strong assessment.The output task with strong assessment was more effective in promoting IVA.In contrast,the task with the involvement of 3 did not differ significantly from the other two tasks with the involvement of 2 in delayed vocabulary test.The difference in involvement load didn’t lead to a difference in delayed recall of vocabulary knowledge.In short,the vocabulary knowledge was not well retained in immediate memory.Finally,there were no significant differences in the effects of output tasks with equal involvement load and the same factors on IVA.It suggests that there was no difference in the effect of output tasks with equal involvement load on IVA.When comparing the immediate and delayed vocabulary test scores of these two groups,no significant differences were found in the mean scores of the two groups.This study has some guidance for teaching English vocabulary,and teachers can select and design different tasks to improve students’ IVA according to the Involvement Load Hypothesis,which is conducive students’ unconscious IVA and thus increase the vocabulary size.