The Effects Of Task Involvement Load On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition In English Listening In Middle School

Most students have great difficulty in learning words, which is also a big headache for English teachers. In order to solve this problem, many researches have proved that acquiring words from reading practices is effective and applicable, which is considered as a kind of incidental vocabulary acquisition, but such studies focused on the listening area are rare.Besides, the Involvement Load Hypothesis proposed by Laufer & Hulstijn(2001) believes that different effects of L2 vocabulary acquisition and retention are influenced by the involvement loads of tasks. Lots of researchers strive to verify the hypothesis through reading, and few studies touch the listening field among middle school students. Hence, the current study is devoted to exploring the effects of the Involvement Load Hypothesis on the L2 incidental vocabulary acquisition through listening in middle school.There are two research questions discussed in the study: 1) Is L2 incidental vocabulary acquisition affected by the involvement loads of listening tasks? 2) For L2 incidental vocabulary retention, which task is the most effective in the delayed vocabulary test among three tasks?In order to solve these problems, 60 Grade Eight students from threeparallel classes in N0.3 Middle School in Cangzhou were invited to take part in the experiment. Then all the subjects were divided into three groups. Each group was asked to finish one listening task. The involvement load of Task 1,Task 2 and Task 3 were 1, 2 and 3. Before the experiment, there was a vocabulary pre-test to examine whether significant difference existed among the three groups. After the experiment, two posttests, immediate and delayed,were carried out to get the results of L2 incidental vocabulary acquisition and retention. All the scores of the pretest and two posttests were analyzed with SPSS 17.0.The findings of the experiment are concluded from two aspects. Firstly,in the immediate vocabulary posttest, the mean score of Group 3 is higher than that of Group 1 and Group 2 in terms of vocabulary acquisition.However, no significant difference is found between Group 1 and Group 2 so the Involvement Load Hypothesis is partially proved. Secondly, Task 3 gets the best vocabulary retention effect among the three tasks, but the task superiority is not so significant in the delayed posttest. Besides, the three groups’ mean scores in the immediate posttest are superior to the respective scores in the delayed test because of the memory decline as time goes by.