Effects Of Different Tasks On Incidental Acquisition Of The Text Content

This study was undertaken to investigate the effects of different learning tasks on incidental acquisition of the text content. The theory on which this study was based were input hypothesis, output hypothesis, memetics and the principle of equal inferential distance in translating. The theoretical significance of this study was that it expanded incidental vocabulary acquisition to incidental acquisition of text content and the practical significance of this study was to help learners grasp the text content.The research questions to be addressed in this study are as follows:1. Which was more effective in incidental acquisition of the text content in the immediate test, imitative writing or back-translation?2. Which was more effective in incidental acquisition of the text content in the delayed test, imitative writing or back-translation?3. Which had higher retention rate in incidental acquisition of the text content, imitative writing or back-translation?The participants of this study were60out of125freshmen from two English education classes and a translation class and a business English class at College of International Studies, Yangzhou University. They were chosen for four reasons. The first one was that the students from provinces other than Jiangsu were excluded where the total scores and their scoring criteria were different; the second one was that the students whose scores ranged from80to92were chosen to make sure that there was no significant difference between them and to avoid the extreme scores; the third one was that some students who took the immediate test without taking the delayed one or who took the delayed test without taking the immediate one were deleted from the calculation; the fourth one was that the students whose scores in the delayed test were higher than the immediate test were deleted from the calculation probably because they had read the text after the immediate test. The four classes were divided into two groups, with two English education classes as imitative writing group of27and the translation class and the business English class as back-translation group of33. In order to prevent the Hawthorne effect, the teacher did not mention anything about the experiment to the students so that they did not need to work extremely hard to please the teacher. The treatment involved two steps. The first step was that before the experiment, the teacher gave imitative writing classes to the imitative writing group and back-translation classes to the back-translation group respectively so that they got familiar with different learning tasks. The second step was that students in the imitative writing group were asked to finish the imitative writing task within70minutes and then were given a20-minute immediate test to see how much text content they could acquire incidentally. The students in the back-translation group repeated the same procedure with the back-translation task. The instrument included two tests designed according to sense groups in the text by the researcher herself:an immediate test and a delayed test taken two weeks later. The format and content of the two tests were exactly the same:filling in blanks, totaling50points. Data were collected from the two tests by the researcher and the reading teacher. Data analysis involved three steps:scoring, Independent sample t-test and calculating the retention rate of incidental acquisition of text content.The three major findings of this study were as follows:Firstly, both imitative writing task and back-translation task had effects on incidental acquisition of text content with the former mean,19.5370points and the latter mean,31.7197, which indicated incidental acquisition could be expanded from vocabulary to text content. This might be attributed to comprehensible input and comprehensible output, which contributed to calling learners’attention to text meaning. Secondly, there was a significant difference between the back-translation group and the imitative writing group in immediate test. The reason might be that the back-translation task took more time and more efforts than the imitative writing task, for example, most students took about60minutes to finish the back-translation task while most students took about50minutes to finish the imitative writing task which meant the back-translation task had deeper processing of text meaning which boosted incidental acquisition of text content. Thirdly, there was no significant difference between the two groups in the delayed test though the back-translation group did better than the imitative writing group. However, the retention rate of the imitative writing group was66.76%, while the retention rate of the back-translation group was53.81%. The retention rate was higher in the imitative writing group than that in the back-translation group, which might be that the back-translation group had higher score in the immediate test.The study had three limitations. One was that the number of samples employed in this study might not be large enough to be generalizable to other samples. Another was that this study was limited to effects of the imitative writing task and the back-translation task on incidental acquisition of the text content. As there were many other different learning tasks, task effects might vary from task to task. Future researches should include other kinds of different learning tasks such as dictation and writing a summary, etc. The other was that the whole experiment lasted three weeks, which could not guarantee its long-term effects on incidental acquisition of text content. More longitudinal studies would be needed to research long-term effects of incidental acquisition of text content.