| Vocabulary is the fundamental element of language and is very crucial to language learning. For a long time, the vocabulary teaching and learning approaches in the vocational colleges are rather single. The vocabulary learning has become a bottleneck for the vocational college students. It is imperative to improve the vocabulary teaching efficiency, especially when the teaching hours for English listening are very limited. More and more English educators have carried many researches on vocabulary teaching and learning strategies. Among the theories of vocabulary acquisition, the concept of "incidental vocabulary acquisition" was proposed by Nagy, Herman and Anderson (1985) on the basis of studying children’s learning their mother tongue. Laufer and Hulstijn (2001) came up with the task-induced "involvement load hypothesis" which is based on the theory of depths of processing. This hypothesis is easy to operate and measure. They claim that the incidental vocabulary acquisition depends on three factors of the task:need, search and evaluate, which decide the involvement load of the task. The more involvement load a task has, the better is the incidental vocabulary acquisition.Linguists have proved that learners can acquire vocabulary incidentally through many reading tasks at class by great amount of studies. But there are only a few of studies on incidental vocabulary acquisition by the listening tasks at class.Our research aim to investigate the effect on the incidental vocabulary acquisition of non-English majors in the vocational colleges with an experiment caused by task-induced involvement load. We conducted the experiment with the156non-English freshmen at similar level of English proficiency in Shandong Foreign Trade Vocational College, who are divided into three groups randomly. They finished three tasks with different involvement index in the listening class:1) Listening comprehension—Checking answers with key (L-C);2) Blank-filling—Checking answers with key—Matching exercise (F-C-M);3) Listening comprehension Checking answers with key—Making up original sentences with target words (L-C-S). After they finished their own tasks, an immediate posttest was conducted, in which the subjects were asked to give the Chinese meaning or English equivalent to the target words. A delayed posttest with same content was conducted one week after the immediate one.After the experiment, the results of immediate and delayed posttests were collected to be analyzed. Paired-Samples T-Test and Independent-Samples T-Test were used to investigate the relationship between the involvement load and incidental vocabulary acquisition. Basically, the results can test the Involvement Load Hypothesis:(1) other factors being equal, task with higher load of involvement will be more effective in terms of vocabulary acquisition and retention than task with lower involvement load.(2) tasks with the same involvement load, but a different distribution of three components will have the same effect on vocabulary acquisition. Which means, with the same involvement index, an input task and an output task will produce the same result in vocabulary acquisition and retention. Meanwhile, we conducted a questionnaire and simple interview to find out that although the students realize the importance of vocabulary learning in listening comprehension generally, they have different ways to learn vocabulary in listening and different emphasis on it.Finally, we discussed the research result, which has tested and enriched the Involvement Load Hypothesis, and has provided some suggestions on vocabulary acquisition in listening teaching. Different tasks at class given by teachers, which are combined with the students’characteristics, can improve the vocabulary acquisition in listening teaching. |
