Effects Of Different Input Modes And Output Tasks On High School Students’ English Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition:An Empirical Study

In recent years,the study of incidental vocabulary acquisition has become a hot research issue in the field of second language acquisition.Researchers have committed to studying the main factors that affect and promote second language acquisition.Most incidental vocabulary researches focus on the impact of the reading input and tasks with different involvement load.However,there are few studies focus on the effects of different input modes and output tasks on IVA.Based on Input hypothesis,Output hypothesis and Noticing hypothesis,this study explores the following two questions:1)Under the same output task,what are the effects of different input modes on student’s IVA?2)Under the same input mode,what are the effects of different output tasks on student’s IVA?The participants in this study are 271 students,who come from grade two from six parallel classes in a senior high school of Changde,Hunan province.The entire empirical study lasted for two weeks.During the whole experiment,all students of the six classes would conduct a prior vocabulary pretest and then they were required to finish different output tasks under different input modes within the segment time.After the output task was done,the participants conducted the immediate post-test;one week later,all the participants took a delayed post-test.All datacollected in this study were analyzed through SPSS 18.0.The study found:1.With the same output task,the groups under audio-visual input acquired more target words than the groups under the reading input.But in terms of vocabulary retention,only with the interactive task,the groups under audio-visual input could got better vocabulary retention result.2.Under the same input mode,the groups with interactive task performed better than the groups with writing task in terms of the effects of incidental vocabulary acquisition and retention.With the writing task or with no intervention task,there was no significant difference between the two input modes.The main findings indicate that input modes and output tasks can both promote incidental vocabulary acquisition.Through this study,we can notice the importance of the input modes and output tasks which teachers should pay more attention.Based on the fact that this study is only an attempt at the effects of different input modes and output tasks on IVA.The inconvenient teaching environment,incomplete teaching objects and time will lead to the defects of this conclusion.So,the effects of different input modes and output tasks on senior high students’ IVA still needs further improvement.