The Effects Of Different English Reading Tasks On Primary School Students’ Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

It has been widely acknowledged that vocabulary,as the building blocks of any language,is one of the most crucial components.In recent years,there is a growing interest in research on incidental vocabulary acquisition.As far as teaching English in the primary school is concerned,vocabulary learning is of great importance,too.However,problems exist in both teaching and learning English vocabulary,which lead to unsatisfactory results.For example,primary school students mainly study vocabulary intentionally under teachers’ direct instruction although incidental vocabulary acquisition may be a better choice to learn vocabulary.After years of studying on incidental vocabulary acquisition,researchers reached a consensus that vocabulary acquisition and retention cannot occur in limited amounts of natural reading.To facilitate learners’ vocabulary acquisition,researchers conducted a great many studies which show that appropriate output tasks can help achieve that as long as involvement load and collaborative learning are given full consideration to in designing reading tasks.The current study sets out to verify the “Involvement Load Hypothesis”and to measure the effectiveness of collaboration on learners’ receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge.According to the purposes of research,this study mainly answers the following questions:1)What is the effect of collaborative or individual output tasks(i.e.text-reconstruction or fill-in-the-blanks)on learners’ receptive vocabulary acquisition and retention?2)What is the effect of collaborative or individual output tasks(i.e.text-reconstruction or fill-in-the-blanks)on learners’ productive vocabulary acquisition and retention?Eighty fourth grade primary school students from two parallel classes participated this study.They read the text with pictures and marginal glosses,and then got into four groups to do two types of tasks on the new target words(i.e.fill-in-the-blanks(+N,-S,+E)and text-reconstruction(+N,-S,++E))individually and collaboratively.Both receptive and productive knowledge of the target words were measured in an immediate post-test and in a four-days-delayed posttest.The data collected was analyzed by SPSS 16.0.The results revealed that: 1)The investigation of both receptive and productive vocabulary in the immediate test indicated that primary school students can acquire about 75% vocabulary knowledge through task-based reading.2)The task with higher involvement load was more effective than the task with lower involvement load in enhancing the participants’ acquisition and retention of receptive vocabulary and the acquisition of productive vocabulary.Yet there was no difference on the productive vocabulary retention between the two types of tasks.3)Collaboration did not bring about positive impact on both receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge in immediate and delayed test situations.In the light of the above findings,the involvement load is a determining factor of task effectiveness.Thus,teachers should take it into consideration when they design reading tasks.Secondly,the fact that the collaborative groups did not outperform the individual groups indicates that how to facilitate the effectiveness of collaborative tasks deserves more attention.