An Empirical Study On Involvement Load Hypothesis

After years of efforts in describing the phenomenon of second language vocabulary acquisition, Involvement Load Hypothesis actually uplifted the research to a new stage: the explanatory stage, thus a theoretical model came into being. In their proposition, Laufer and Hulstijn introduced a construct of involvement with motivational and cognitive dimensions: need, search and evaluation and claimed that retention of unfamiliar words was generally conditional upon the amount of involvement while processing these words. As a motivational element, need is concerned with the "desire to achieve" and can be imposed by the task or the learner himself. Search and evaluation are two elements within the domain of cognition. Search refers to "the attempt to find the meaning of an unknown L2 word by consulting a dictionary or another authority" while evaluation entails "a comparison of a given word with other words, a specific meaning of a word with its other meanings" (Laufer & Hulstijn, 2001).A milestone as it is, Involvement Load Hypothesis can hardly escape the fortune of all the theories at their early stage. Thinking twice, we can see that something in this Hypothesis seems ignored, especially the learners' central role and the complex nature of information processing in language learning.In review of the related theories, this study attempts to reconsider the three components and thus modify this Hypothesis from the perspective of psycho-cognitive dimension. In detail, need, dynamic in nature, is roughly measured by learners' interest in the classroom setting and then the levels of evaluation is classified according to the stages in Zhang & Wu's (2003) Cognitive Psychological Model of L2 Lexical Competence Development in the classroom setting. Moreover, the Modified version of Involvement Load Hypothesis claims that search will be present when an unknown word turns to be a known one.Within the framework of the Modified version of Involvement Load Hypothesis, an experiment was designed to investigate how language learning tasks affect incidental learning vocabulary acquisition by adult Chinese learners. Moreover, it is totest in what respects and to what degree the Hypothesis would predict the effectiveness of task on incidental vocabulary learning. What's more, it is expected to testify the modification and encourage more research to improve the Hypothesis in order to apply it in second language pedagogy.Altogether 205 sophomores took part in the experiment. Divided randomly into 4 groups, the participants were required to read a passage and to do 4 tasks respectively which induced different involvement in terms of the Modified version of Involvement Load Hypothesis. The material used in the present study was adopted from Huang's (2003) study for the purpose of validity. 10 important content words were selected as the target words but were replaced by corresponding non-word made by Gathercole and Papagno (1991) (quoted from Ke & Dong, 2003), to ensure every participant could have no chances to encounter these target words before. All the material was collected when tasks were finished and participants had no idea to take a test on target words. Tests were taken immediately and one week later, which were called the immediate test and the delayed posttest.In our design, we had four independent variables: tasks, need, evaluation and time, and one dependent variable: scores. Here time refers to the immediate test and delayed posttest (one week later). Five hypotheses were proposed for the correlation of the independent variables and the dependent variable, and thus results and analyses of correlation and significant difference by SPSS 10.0 were presented respectively for those hypotheses.The present study sets out to answer these questions:1. Does each task result in word retention? Does incidental vocabulary acquisition really exist in L2 learning?2. Is the retention of unfamiliar words generally conditional upon the various involvement loads?3. Does need with more prominence result in better word retention, when search and evaluation are constant?4. Does evaluation with more prominence result in better word retention, when search and need are constant?5. What are the relations of the three factors? The results of the study and the analyses indicate that:1. Each task in this study does result in word retention, thus providing a positive evidence for incidental vocabulary acquisition in L2, and.2. Higher involvement load generally but not necessarily leads to better word retention.3. Need does have some influence on word retention, but the correlation is low.4. The levels of evaluation generally can predict the effect of tasks on word retention, thus tasks inducing higher evaluation generally produce better word retention. However, attention should be paid to the limited processing capability of the learners.5. As to the relative role of the three factors in the Hypothesis, evaluation is the most important, next comes to need and search is of the least importance.This study is of great significance both in theoretical and pedagogical perspectives. Theoretically, this study would enlarge the explanatory power of the Hypothesis by digging further into Constructivism instead of objective cognitive processing and would verify the Involvement Load Hypothesis in Chinese-context setting. Besides, the present study provided a further positive evidence for L2 incidental vocabulary acquisition. In practice, the results of the study would facilitate foreign language vocabulary acquisition inside and outside classroom.