Effects Of Different Reading Tasks On Senior High School Students’ Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition And Retention

Vocabulary is the foundation of language learning.In English learning,most high school students have great problem in vocabulary.Hence,increasing the efficiency of vocabulary learning in the process of building students’ language skills has been a hot topic for researchers and teachers of foreign languages.Incidental vocabulary acquisition refers to a process in which students acquire vocabulary incidentally when undertaking other learning tasks without having an attention on vocabulary(Laufer,1998).On the basis of “involvement load hypothesis”,researchers combined reading with incidental vocabulary acquisition so as to investigate how to facilitate incidental vocabulary acquisition through altering the amount of involvement of reading tasks.Nevertheless,many current studies in this filed are mainly concentrated on college students,and less concern was shown on students of middle school.The “involvement load hypothesis” proposed by Laufer and Hulstijn(2001)holds that the amount of involvement that induced by tasks will determine how well incidental vocabulary acquisition works when other factors are the same.The higher the level of involvement is,the better the impact of incidental acquisition of vocabulary will be.It is vital to further investigate the effect of involvement load on incidental vocabulary acquisition because many studies afterwards attempted to test the validity of the hypothesis,however some studies can only partially support it.Thus,the present study concentrates on Chinese senior high school EFL learners,aims to test the effects of reading tasks which varies in the amount of involvement on learners’ incidental vocabulary acquisition through combining English reading tasks with incidental vocabulary acquisition.This study aims to explore an effective way of“learn in reading”for senior high school’s English vocabulary teaching.This study combined the method of quantitative and qualitative.In this paper,80 students of two parallel Senior Two classes in Lanzhou No.18 Senior High School were chosen for the experiment,which was conducted from September to December2022.All four groups read the same passage with ten target words.On the basis of“involvement load hypothesis”,the researcher designed four reading tasks which varies in involvement load and in the components.Task one is reading comprehension and copying the sample sentences with the target words with the involvement load being 1;Task two is reading materials and filling in the blanks with the involvement load being 2;Task three is reading comprehension and meaning-match with the involvement load being 3;Task four is reading comprehension and sentence making,having the same amount of involvement load with Task three but the components is different from Task three.80 senior high school students in four groups were asked to complete different reading tasks and then to fill in the immediate and delayed vocabulary tests of incidental vocabulary acquisition.Statistical analysis of collected data using descriptive statistics,one-way ANOVA,independent-samples t test,Multiple Comparisons and paired-samples t test in SPSS26.0 software.The findings are as follows when the questionnaire and interview results are combined:Firstly,the reading tasks with different amount of involvement not only had a significant influence on immediate incidental vocabulary acquisition but also on delayed incidental vocabulary acquisition.In terms of facilitating incidental vocabulary acquisition,tasks with bigger involvement load are more efficient than tasks with lower involvement load.Secondly,task three and task four has the same amount of involvement load but different distribution of the components did not have a significant influence on immediate incidental vocabulary acquisition,but have a significant influence on delayed incidental vocabulary acquisition.The“evaluation”index is stronger than that of “search” index in the delayed vocabulary tests.Thirdly,there is a significant difference between immediate incidental vocabulary acquisition and delayed incidental vocabulary acquisition for each four tasks.The immediate vocabulary test scores are all superior to the delayed vocabulary test scores.This indicates that the effects of these four tasks on vocabulary acquisition was not optimal.Despite having the highest amount of involvement,Task 3 had the weakest impact on vocabulary retention.The above findings partially verified the “involvement load hypothesis” and proved that the involvement load of reading task has a crucial impact on incidental vocabulary acquisition for high school students.This suggests that teachers should consciously alter the involvement load in reading tasks to help students acquire vocabulary incidentally and facilitate students’ vocabulary acquisition efficiency.In addition,under the conscious guidance of the teacher,students need to review and rehearse the newly learned vocabulary in time to obtain better memory.This study offers fresh evidence of incidental vocabulary learning in second languages and sheds new light on senior high school English teaching.Future studies should investigate deeper into the incidental vocabulary acquisition in second languages at all levels.To give more convincing evidence for incidental vocabulary acquisition and the“involvement load hypothesis”,different research methods may be employed.