| Vocabulary acquisition is currently receiving more and more attention in second language pedagogy and research. But it is still far from clear how learners acquire vocabulary or how it can be taught. Nevertheless, it is a commonsense notion that with regard to vocabulary learning, the more a learner engages with a new word, the more likely they are to learn it. The notion was defined and operationalized by Laufer and Hultijn's (2001) Involvement Load Hypothesis, which is assumed that incidental vocabulary acquisition is conditional upon the amount of task-induced involvement while processing these words. Involvement load is defined as the combination of presence or absence of the three involvement factors: need, search and evaluation. The greater the involvement load, the better the retention. Meanwhile, there has been an increasing interest in the study of formulaic sequences for the past two decades as the acquisition of formulaic sequences plays a vital role in language learning. Although some empirical experiments at home and abroad have tested the Hypothesis to a certain extent; however, most research has only investigated the effects of the Hypothesis on single words. Given together, the author attempts to investigate the predictive power of the Hypothesis on the acquisition of formulaic sequences and hopes to find an effective way to facilitate their acquisition.Three tasks (reading task, reading plus fill-in task, and writing sentences task) with different involvement loads were designed to investigate their impacts on the productive knowledge of formulaic sequences acquired incidentally. Each task was administrated to each intact non-English major undergraduate class. Based on frequency and usefulness criteria, 10 formulaic sequences from the selected experimental reading material were decided upon after being piloted. And a controlled test format was used to investigate the retention of the written form of formulaic sequences in immediate and delayed posttests. All collected data was submitted to analysis using SSPS13.0.The study extends empirical support for the construct of Hypothesis in L2 formulaic sequence acquisition by stating that tasks (the reading plus fill-in task, and the writing sentences task) with higher involvement load were really effective than tasks (the reading task) with lower involvement load on the retention of formulaic sequences' written form; while contra the predictions of the Hypothesis, the writing sentences task with the greatest involvement load did not yield the highest retention scores and the potential difference of the evaluation component could not be readily accounted for by the Hypothesis. In addition, the effectiveness of output tasks seemed to be better than that of input tasks. Finally, the present study seemed to test the notion that formulaic sequences appear to be stored as holistic units, but they may not be acquired in an all-or-nothing manner (Schmitt & Carter, 2004).Although the Hypothesis is only partially supported in this study, the findings have significant pedagogical implications on College English learning. The author suggests that the teaching and learning of formulaic sequences based on the integration of incidental learning and intentional/explicit learning will be conducive to vocabulary acquisition. Specifically, teachers can make more efforts to design all kinds of output tasks to direct learners' explicit attention to useful formulaic sequences in order to raise their awareness of formulaic sequences and enhance their knowledge of them; and encourage learners to have the maximizing sustained engagement with the learning of formulaic sequences and consolidate those formulaic sequences acquired incidentally via consciously using of them.
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