Effects Of Enhanced Input And Output Task On Vocabulary Acquisition

The present thesis is mainly focused on exploring the effects of enhanced inputand output task on foreign language vocabulary acquisition.How to cultivate student’s communication skill has become one hot topic in thedomain of foreign language teaching, and it’s well acknowledged that communicationcompetence is highly related with vocabulary knowledge and ability. Word acquisitionin classroom settings usually involves input, output and feedback. However, there areseveral noticeable problems regarding this process. Firstly, it seems that there is notenough effective word knowledge input, many students can not forge a solid memoryof new words during class hours. Secondly, the majority of students usually havesome difficulties in speaking and writing due to lack of actual use of the target words.Thirdly, most students have a very limited vocabulary, especially insufficient in activewords. And fourthly, many students are incapable of using words properly in differentcontextual and cultural situations. All these problems hinder students from improvingtheir English language proficiency. Hence, how to enlarge vocabulary has become oneof the priorities in English teaching and research.The current thesis, starting from introducing Richard’s word knowledge types,Nation’s word knowledge framework, incidental vocabulary acquisition theory, takesKrashen’s Input Hypothesis, Swain’s output hypothesis, Laufer&Hulstijn’sInvolvement Load Hypothesis and Gass’s Input-Output theory as its theoreticalframework, and is aimed to explore the effects of enhanced input and output task onword acquisition through reading as to answer the following research questions:1. Does extensive reading task triggers incidental vocabulary acquisition? If itdoes, how effective it could be?2. Does vocabulary enhanced input reading task significantly enhance learners’efficiency in acquiring vocabulary? 3. What is the effectiveness of vocabulary enhanced input reading task whencombined with vocabulary output task?The above three questions involves three vocabulary acquisition strategies,which differ in task types and involvements. And the current study is mainly focusedon two variables, i.e., enhanced input and output task. The participants were124freshmen from three intact classes from Shandong Yingcai College, whose Englishproficiency was basically at the same level. They were divided into three groups: the RGroup, the R+I group, and the R+I+O Group. The whole experiment consisted of onepretest, one immediate posttest, one prolonged posttest and one final posttest, with allthe experiment materials taken from the Second Volume of Twenty-First CenturyPractical College English. Experiment data was collected and analyzed, and the resultswere compared and discussed.The research findings indicate that reading without vocabulary enhanced inputdoes benefit vocabulary acquisition, but the effect is not significant; reading withenhanced input is significantly helpful to acquiring new words, especially in short term;vocabulary enhanced input reading task combined with vocabulary output task prove avery effective way of acquiring new words, both in short term and long term.