Effects Of Different Involvement Loads Of Tasks On The Incidental Learning Of Collocations Through Reading

The development of second language largely depends on vocabulary.Previous studies have shown the effects of intentional learning by explicit instruction on second language vocabulary.But the fact is that in the normal class,students can learn a very limited amount of vocabulary.Schmitt(2000)suggests that in addition to the intentional learning,learners should learn incidentally.Since then,many studies are conducted to examine the effects of different ways on the incidental learning of vocabulary.Previous studies on incidental learning mainly focus on the single word items.However,researches indicate that a large proportion of language is made up of collocations.Although many linguistic researches have proved the importance of collocations in second language,there are a small number of published researches about the incidental learning of collocations.The studies on incidental learning of collocations in China are far less than that abroad.A small number of existing studies focus on the incidental learning of collocations of high level students,and studies on the incidental learning of collocations among middle school students are quite few.The present study tries to examine the effects of involvement load of task on the incidental learning of English collocations' form and meaning.Therefore,the following three research questions are explored:(1)What are the effects of involvement loads of reading taskson the incidental learning of collocation's form and meaning in the immediate test?(2)What are the effects of involvement loads of reading taskson the incidental learning of collocation's form and meaning in the delayed test?(3)What are the learner's attitudes toward English collocation learning?Based on the Involvement Load Hypothesis(ILH),the researcher designed three different tasks with different involvement loads.Task1 is multiple choice tests and the items are not related to the target collocations,but the target collocations are provided with Chinese meaning in the margin.Task 2 is translation of sentence with the target collocation in it.The target collocations are provided with different Chinese meanings and participants need to evaluate the most proper meaning for the sentence.Task3 is to write sentence with the target collocations.And the target collocations are in bold face in text but not provided with their meanings.The involvement index of the three tasks is 1,2,and 3 respectively.The whole experiment lasted for three weeks.Twenty students of the eighth grade in the Third Middle school at Wei Yuan,Ding Xi,Gan Su province participated in the study.In the first week,five of them participated in the selection of target collocations.In the second week,fifteen of the students with the same English proficiency were assigned into the three different involvement load tasks with ten target collocations in a classroom setting.After they finished their own task,an immediate test that consists of ten multiple-choice items for measuring the knowledge of collocation's form and ten translation items measuring the knowledge of collocation's meaning were given without notification.One week later the participants were asked to take a delayed test with the same testing form as the immediate test but in different sequence.After the test,seven of the participants were interviewed about their attitudes toward collocation learning and their difficulties in learning collocation.The results show that(a)in the immediate test,middle school students can learn collocation's form and meaning incidentally through different involvement load tasks.But the learning results are different due to the different involvement load of tasks.Students performed better both in the incidental learning of collocation's form and meaning in task with higher involvement load.(b)In the delayed test,students also have a good performance for the retention of collocation's form and meaning with the high involvement load task.In the delayed test for form,the results also showed that among the three components(need,search,evaluation)of Involvement Load,‘search' plays an important role for the retention of collocation's form.(c)The interview shows that students reflected that they do have problems in learning collocations.They have trouble in memorizing and using collocations.Presently,most of the English reading materials are assisted with multiple-choice test,but students express that reading materials with some higher involvement load tasks such as translation tasks or sentence writing tasks would be more helpful for them to learn collocation incidentally and at the same time to consolidate the incidentally learned language points.