An Experimental Research On The Effect Of Different Indexes Of Involvement Load On Middle School Students’ Incidental Acquisition Of Formulaic Sequences

It is a commonsense notion that with regard to vocabulary learning, the more a learnerengages with a new word, the more likely they are to learn it. This notion was defined andoperationalized by Laufer and Hulstijn’s (2001) Involvement Load Hypothesis, which isassumed that incidental vocabulary acquisition is conditional upon the amount oftask-induced involvement while processing these words. Meanwhile, there has been agrowing interest in the study of formulaic sequences in SLA for the past two decades. Butonly a limited number of researches tested the Involvement Load Hypothesis in the area offormulaic sequences. As a result, the present study aims to investigate the effect ofinvolvement load on middle school students’ incidental formulaic sequence acquisition,exploring an effective way of teaching formulaic sequences.128students from six classes of Senior Grade One participated in the experiment. Theywere divided into three groups to read the same reading material but completed three differentpost-reading tasks with different indexes of involvement load, namely true or false plus fill-in(1+0+1), sentence translation (1+0+2) and sentence writing (1+0+2). Fifteen target formulaicsequences were chosen and participants’ acquisition and retention of these formulaicsequences in immediate and delayed post tests were analyzed.It is found that:1) Involvement Load is an important factor in participants’ acquisitionand retention of formulaic sequences. In both acquisition and retention of the target formulaicsequences, the sentence writing group (1+0+2) performed better than true or false plus fill-ingroup (1+0+1) and the sentence translation group performed better than the true or false plusfill-in group (1+0+2);2) Involvement load is not the only factor influencing middle schoolstudents’ acquisition and retention of the target formulaic sequences, partially confirming theInvolvement Load Hypothesis. Specifically, in tasks which induce the same index ofinvolvement load, productive task (i.e., sentence writing) performed better than receptive task(i.e., sentence translation), thus it is assumed that productive task is more facilitative ofstudents’ acquisition of the formulaic sequences. However, the superiority of the productivetask did not pertain in participants’ retention of the target formulaic sequences;3) The maineffect of involvement load is found in different types of formulaic sequences, namely, continuity and grammatical level sequences. Specifically, participants’ performance ofcontinuous formulaic sequences was better than the discontinuous ones and the acquisitionand retention of the word level formulaic sequences was better than the sentence level ones.Besides, the positive effect of involvement load was indicated. However, no interactive effectwas found between the involvement load and the type of formulaic sequences.The present study shed light on teaching and research of formulaic sequences. Inteaching middle school students formulaic sequences, different kinds of output tasks shouldbe designed to stimulate learners’ formulaic sequence knowledge. In addition, revision of thenewly-learnt formulaic sequences should be conducted. Lastly, teachers should pay attentionto the participants’ difference in performance in different types of formulaic sequences.