| Vocabulary, as a crucial component of language, plays a very significant role in both native and foreign language learning. Many research explored effective instructions for language learning. Recently, the concept of Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition (IVA) was put forward which held that learners incidentally acquired vocabularies through reading. And it has been proved that IVA does exist in L2and foreign language learning. However, if readers only read the passage, it is slow and ineffective to acquire vocabulary, so researchers begin to explore instructional interventions such as Involvement Load Hypothesis in order to promote incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading.From the perspective of Involvement Load Hypothesis, the present thesis aims to carry out an extensive reading experiment and three surveys attended by100middle school students. The author has conducted the grouped experiments involving different newspapers, reading materials and task involvements. The learners’gains of incidental vocabulary are explored through vocabulary tests. And the author makes use of the statistic tool-SPSS version16.0to analyze the raw date which are from the scores of vocabulary tests.The author has analyzed the empirical results and interpreted them in the light of the Involvement Load Hypothesis, the Noticing Assumption and Input Assumption. Results indicate that:(1) Given the same involvement, Teens has an advantage in incidental vocabulary acquisition by reading21st Century.(2) Given the same involvement, students can acquire more vocabulary while reading the materials with pictures.(3)"Reading with tasks" promotes better incidental vocabulary acquisition than "reading only". And within the certain scope, the higher involvement the tasks contain, the better acquisition students will have.The results may throw some lights on the vocabulary learning and language teaching in the Chinese classroom. As to the students, the author believes that it will be more effective for students to enlarge their vocabulary by task-based reading rather than rotting learning wordlists. Speaking to the teachers, they can assign some reading tasks and activities during the extensive reading in order to enhance the effective of vocabulary acquisition. |
