The Effects Of Different Reading Task Types On Incidental Vocabulary Learning By High School Students

The issue of second language vocabulary acquisition has long been a subject of great interest.To date,a variety of ways have been put forward to find out how to help students acquire the second language vocabulary efficiently.With research of incidental vocabulary acquisition going further,many researchers propose that incidental vocabulary acquisition can be achieved through different tasks while the depth of processing is the determining factor of it.Currently in China,reading is still the most popular mode for students to learn English in both high schools and colleges.Accordingly,which reading task is the most efficient and effective means as regards incidental vocabulary acquisition deserves our further study.The present study is based on the Involvement Load Hypothesis proposed by Hulstijn&Laufer(2001).The study adopted three reading tasks,namely,answering questions,blank filling with target words and making sentences with target words,intending to further verify how different tasks affect the initial learning and retention of target words by L2 learners.Altogether 124 Senior High School students participated in the study.They were given an immediate posttest and a delayed posttest.Besides,within each task group,the subjects were further divided into two subgroups,low achievers and high achievers to see whether different tasks have different influence on different subjects.The major findings are as follows:Different tasks have different effects on the initial learning and retention of the target words.The higher the level of the involvement load,the more effective the task is in promoting vocabulary acquisition.Among the three tasks,sentence-making with the highest involvement load is the most effective,the effect of gap-filling is in between and answering questions is the least effective.The study also finds that subjects of different levels of proficiency are affected differently by different tasks.In the immediate posttest test,there exist significant differences between the sentence-making and answering-questions task for high achievers.However,as to the delayed test,no difference exists between the high and low achievers.So in this study the findings concerning the effects of task types among students of different levels of proficiency are not fully in accordance with the Involvement Load Hypothesis.Therefore,some specifications should be made as regards the involvement load index.Finally some suggestions are proposed to vocabulary teaching in high school.