The Effect Of Reading Tasks With Different Involvement Load On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Of Grade Two Students In Senior High School

Vocabulary learning has been playing the most indispensable role in English learning, so teachers spend too much time and energy on promoting efficient vocabulary learning of students. However, a phenomenon of low efficiency and time-consuming in English vocabulary learning is still relatively widespread in China. In order to improve this situation, an increasing number of researchers at home and abroad have paid more attention to seeking more effective vocabulary learning strategies. Recently, Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition (IVA) has exerted a tremendous fascination on scholars. And they deem that IVA is not regarded as an intentional way to acquire English vocabulary but a by-product of other language activities. However, most subjects of these studies are native speakers or advanced-level ELF learners, and few researchers select intermediate-level ELF learners as subjects.The author attempts to conduct a research to testify about the effect of reading tasks with different involvement load on IVA. In this study, the intermediate-level English learners are selected as subjects, and four different reading tasks are designed. They are simply reading without tasks; reading and multiple choices; reading and blank fillings; reading and sentence translations. Then the vocabulary test and interview are applied to prove three research questions.1. Whether reading tasks with different involvement load can affect the IVA of Grade Two students in senior high school and how do they affect students’ IVA? 2. What is the correlation between the reading tasks with different involvement load and students’IVA? 3. What’s the opinion and attitude of subjects towards the effect of reading tasks with different involvement load on IVA after this experiment?The whole research undergoes three phases:the pre phase, the immediate and post phase and it lasts two months. It adopts a mixing method of the quantitative and the qualitative method, and the results of test and interview indicate that:firstly, reading tasks with different involvement load indeed affect students’IVA. And the more involvement load, the better effect on IVA. Additionally, the correlation between them is a kind of positive correlation. Lastly, most subjects are in favor of IVA, but a number of students still remain unconvinced attitudes towards it and they also point out the disadvantage of IVA. Based on it, the author hopes to provide some related suggestions about how to promote IVA through designing reading tasks with varying involvement load.