A Study On The Effects Of Listening Tasks With Different Involvement Loads On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Of Junior High School Students

Vocabulary learning, as one of the m ost important parts for language learning, is a m ajor difficulty for students in learning English. To improve the effic iency of English teaching and reduce students ’ burden of vocabulary learning, the current thesis attempts to int egrate the incident al vocabul ary acquisit ion(I VA) into the formal listening teaching process, hopefully, students can learn vocabulary incidentally through listening. 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 acquisit ion depends on three factors of the task: need, search and evaluate, which decide the involvem ent load of the task. The more involvement load a task has, the better is the incidental vocabulary acquis it ion.Based on the theoretical foundat ions of the depth of the processing hypothesis, input and output hypothesis, and the involvement load hypothes is, the thesis intends to answer the follow ing questions :1. Do the listening tasks with different involvement loads have different effects on incidental vocabulary acquisit ion and retent ion? If they do, are tasks with higher involvement loads more effective than tasks with lower involvem ent loads in incident al vocabulary acquisit ion and retent ion?2. Do the listening tasks with the same involvement loads index but with different distribut ion of three indexes(need, search, evaluat ion) have the same effects on incidental vocabulary acquis ition and retention?The experiment is conducted with the 100 junior high school students at similar level of English proficiency, who are divided into three groups randomly. They finished three listening tasks with different involvem ent index in the listening class :(1) Task 1(Group1): Listening comprehens ion---with words list;(2) Task 2(Group2): Blank-f illing---Matching exerc ise---without words list;(3) Task 3(Group3): Listening comprehension---Making up sentences with target words--- words list. After they finished their own tasks, an immediat e test was conducted, in which the subjects were asked to give the Chinese or English meaning to the target words. A delayed test with same content w as conducted one week after the immediate one.After the experim ent, the results of immediate and delayed tests were collected to be analyzed. One –way ANOVAs, Paired-Samples T-Test and Independent-Samples T-Test were used to investigate the differences among three groups. Basically, the results can test the hypothesis:(1) other factors being equal, task with higher load of involvement will be more effective in terms of vocabulary acquisit ion and retent ion than task with lower involvement load.(2) tasks with the same involvement load, but a different distr ibut ion of three indexes will have the same effect on vocabulary acquis it ion, which means, with the same involvem ent index, an input task and an output task will produce the same result in vocabulary acquis it ion and retent ion.Finally, the thes is discussed the research result, which has tested and enriched the Involvem ent Load Hypothes is, and has provided some suggestions on vocabulary acquisit ion in listening teaching. The teacher can improve the vocabulary acquisit ion in listening teaching through presenting different tasks and combin ing the characteristics of students.