| Vocabulary learning is regarded as one of the most fundamental aspects for languagelearning, for all of language skills, such as listening, speaking, reading, writing andtranslating, are on the basis of certain vocabulary. Currently, there are some problems withnon-English majors’ vocabulary learning in China. Therefore, more and more researchersand English teachers focus on seeking more efficient way for vocabulary learning. Inrecent years, there have been a large number of literature and empirical researchesconfirmed the positive role of output in incidental vocabulary acquisition, but most of themjust compared the output with input, or compared written output with oral output to provewhich is more effective in promoting the vocabulary acquisition. In the process ofdesigning the output tasks, few of them investigated the effect of different output tasks onincidental vocabulary acquisition by matching different types of output (oral or written)with different ways of learning (collaboratively or individually).On the basis of related theory of incidental vocabulary acquisition, output hypothesis,interaction hypothesis, the depth of processing theory and involvement load hypothesis,this thesis attempts to explore the effect of different output tasks on non-English majors’incidental vocabulary acquisition, the research tries to testify three research questions:(1)In incidental vocabulary acquisition, which one has better effect, collaborative outputactivities or individual output activities?(2) In incidental vocabulary acquisition, whichone has better effect, oral output activities or written output activities?(3) In incidentalvocabulary acquisition, which one has the best effect, collaboratively oral output activities,collaboratively written output activities, individually oral output activities or individuallywritten output activities?In order to answer the above questions, a research was conducted in Shanxi DatongUniversity.138freshmen of college of law were randomly chosen from four parallelclasses. After the pretest,132participants who had the similar vocabulary proficiency wererandomly divided into four groups. All of the participants were required to finish a readingcomprehension, the target words were printed in boldface in the passage, and their phoneticsymbols, sample sentences and glosses in Chinese and English were printed on the otherpaper according to the order in which they appear in the passage. After readingcomprehension, the four groups of participants returned the passage and kept the newwords list, and then performed four different output tasks within the given time:(1) retellthe passage individually;(2) rewrite the passage individually;(3) retell the passage collaboratively;(4) rewrite the passage collaboratively. All of the participants wererequired to use the target words on the list during their reconstruction of the passage. Thecollaborative groups were asked to write their outlines respectively and then compose them,and their discussion was recorded throughout the process to ensure the presentation wasthe result of their collaborative work. Each groups was given40minutes which wasabsolutely sufficient for them to finish the tasks, and then they took part in the vocabularytest on the target words by the immediate posttest and the delayed posttest. The results oftests were analyzed through SPSS statistical software.Through comparison and analysis, the results showes that the both mean scores ofcollaborative output group in immediate posttest and delayed test are higher thanindividual output group, but there is no significant difference between them in immediatetest, and in delayed test the significant difference exists. This result proves Long’sInteraction Hypothesis, and its possible explanation is that the negotiated interactionpromotes the participants’ IVA. The second finding is that the mean scores of written groupare higher than oral group in both posttests, but there is no significant difference betweenthem in immediate test, and in delayed test the significant difference exists. Maybe thesemantic elaboration, structural elaboration and grammatical elaboration in the process ofwriting promote the participants’ IVA. And the results also show that for the participants’IVA, the collaborative written task is the most effective task and the effect of individualoral task is the worst in both posttests. The reason is possibly that collaborative written taskhas the advantages of both collaborative task and written task.Therefore, in the future English teaching, teachers should provide learners with moreopportunities to the output according to the learners’ characteristics and the teaching goal,increase the chances of collaborative learning, and help the learners preferably acquirevocabulary incidentally. |
