An Experimental Study On Chinese College Students' Incidental Vocabulary Learning

The important role of vocabulary knowledge in learning language is well discussed and has aroused the interest of many foreign language teachers and linguists. Most linguists believe a large proportion of vocabulary is acquired incidentally. Incidental vocabulary learning is a new term that has turned up in the field of applied linguistics in recent decades. The reason why the kind of acquisition is called "incidental" by some linguists is because the vocabulary acquisition is not the aim but a by-product in the learning activities.Laufer and Hulstijin proposed the "Involvement Load Hypothesis" in 2001, which claimed that vocabulary gain and retention would be higher with a greater level of task involvement load. The hypothesis was explained from the view of psychological cognition, such as need, research, and evaluation. The present study examined the effects of task involvement load on incidental vocabulary learning. The subjects' incidental vocabulary learning gains and retentions are explored through one experiment, two tests and two surveys. 114 college sophomore non-English majors were randomly assigned to two different reading tasks: (1) reading and answering questions; (2) reading and retelling. The immediate test and the delayed test are used to check the incidental vocabulary learning gains and retentions. The learning-strategy questionnaire and the vocabulary-size survey help to differentiate learner's variable.The results of the current study are summarized as follows:1. Task with a higher involvement load, as predicted by the Involvement Load Hypothesis, is more effective for incidental vocabulary gains than the task with a lower involvement load.2. Involvement loads also have delayed effect on vocabulary retention, that is, the task superiority can be remained in the delayed retention test between 2 experimental groups. But because of the 'time' effect, the immediate test yields better word gain than the delayed test.3. The subjects' vocabulary size also plays a significant role in incidental vocabulary learning.