An Empirical Study Of Senior High School Students’ Incidental English Vocabulary Acquisition

Vocabulary is very important in the language system, and it’s the key to the English learning and also the focus of the second language researchers.Compared to the traditional vocabulary learning, incidental vocabulary acquisition is more effective. And the studying of it enriches our understanding of vocabulary acquisition,brings fresh air to the study, and gives us lots of inspiration on vocabulary teaching.Enlarging vocabulary by reading is advocated by a lot of researchers, and many studies indicate that different task involvement loads have great effects on vocabulary acquisition.Therefore, the author chooses to study the effect on the students who study in one of the senior high schools in Zhangzhou. Based on Laufer & Hulstijn’s Involvement Load Hypothesis, the author does an empirical study. Firstly, the author investigates the vocabulary learning situation of high school students and then test the students’ vocabulary acquisition by giving them different task involvement loads while reading. Finally, the author analyzes the results of the immediate test and delayed test.151 students from Senior Grade Two participate in the experiment, they are divided into three groups randomly. They are asked to read the same reading material but complete three different post-reading tasks. They all participate the immediate test and the delayed test of the ten vocabularies after finishing the reading task. By analyzing the collected data by SPSS, the author finds that:(1) reading will promote learners’ Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition;(2)the reading tasks of different involvements will influence the learners’ immediate memory and delayed memory of vocabulary: the more involvement, the better the memory effect;(3)the reading tasks of different involvements will influence the learners’ vocabulary maintaining: the more involvement, the better the vocabulary maintaining. In view of this,English teachers should encourage students to read more, try their best to provide more chance for students to read, make full use of the positive effect of Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition and task involvement, and combine the English vocabulary learning to incidental acquisition closely in order to have an effective vocabulary teaching.