A Study Of The Effects Of Topic Familiarity And Task Load Involvement On Incidental Acquisition Of English Vocabulary Collocations By High School Students

Collocation is closely related to vocabulary learning and has gradually become the focus of contemporary linguistic researchers.Since the 1990 s,linguistic researchers have started to study incidental vocabulary acquisition and have achieved some results.For the incidental acquisition of vocabulary collocation,although domestic and foreign scholars have begun to study,most of them are concentrated in college students,and there is little research on incidental acquisition of vocabulary collocation by senior high school students.And the incidental acquisition of vocabulary collocation is influenced not only by the topic familiarity but also by task-induced involvement.Therefore,this study will combine the topic familiarity with task-induced involvement and take the input hypothesis,the involvement load hypothesis,forgetting curve theory and content schema theory as the theoretical basis to explore the incidental acquisition of vocabulary collocation by senior high school students.This study takes 200 secondary students from four classes in Putian City,Fujian Province as the research subjects.They are divided into one pilot test class and three experimental classes.Each class has 50 students.The author selects two reading texts with different familiarity through the results of topic familiarity questionnaires and determines the target vocabulary collocations,and sets reading tasks with different involvement load for three experimental classes,and performs immediate and delayed(one week and one month later)vocabulary collocation tests.This study will intend to explore three questions:(1)What's the main effect of topic familiarity on incidental acquisition of vocabulary collocation by senior high school students?(2)What's the main effect of task-induced involvement on incidental acquisition of vocabulary collocation by senior high school students?(3)Does the topic familiarity and task-induced involvement have interactive effects on incidental acquisition of vocabulary collocation by senior high school students? If so,what are the interactive effects?The results show that:(1)Under different tasks,the mean value of the most familiar topic in the immediate,one week later,and one month later delayed scores are all higher than the least familiar topic,and the differences between the most familiar topic and the least familiar topic are all significant(less than 0.05).(2)Regardless of whether the topic is familiar or not,the highest mean value are all the sentence-making task with the highest involvement load,followed by translation task,and the lowest mean value are all the reading comprehension with the lowest involvement load in the immediate,one week later,and one month later delayed scores.And the differences of the three tasks are all significant(less than 0.05).(3)The significant levels of interaction between topic familiarity and task types in the immediate,one week later,and one month later delayed scores are 0.039,0.010 and 0.006(less than 0.05),indicating that the topic familiarity and task-induced involvement have significant interactive effects on incidental acquisition of vocabulary collocation.The three tasks in the task-induced involvement are inconsistent in the influence trend of the two levels of topic familiarity.No matter whether it is immediate,one week later,or one month later delayed score,there is no difference between the translation and sentence-making tasks that relatively high involvement load in terms of the most familiar topic.However,there are big differences in the three tasks in terms of the least familiar topic,resulting in interaction between the two.From the above research,it may be concluded that: The topic familiarity has a significant positive impact on the incidental acquisition and retention of vocabulary collocation by senior high school students.The more familiar the topic,the better the incidental acquisition and retention of vocabulary collocation.The task-induced involvement has a significant positive impact on the incidental acquisition and retention of vocabulary collocation by senior high school students.The greater the involvement load,the better the incidental acquisition and retention of vocabulary collocation.The topic familiarity and task-induced involvement have significant interactive effects on the incidental acquisition and retention of vocabulary collocation by senior high school students.In terms of the most familiar topic,the translation and sentence-making tasks that relatively high involvement load have little influence on incidental acquisition of vocabulary collocation.However,in terms of the least familiar topic,the three tasks of different involvement load have a significant impact on incidental acquisition of vocabulary collocation.The conclusions of this study will provide some suggestions for teaching.As senior high school English teachers,they should encourage students learn more vocabulary collocations by reading and set high involvement load tasks that meet the second language level and vocabulary level of senior high school students.Besides,teachers should guide students to be familiar with more topics and review and practice new vocabulary collocations frequently.