The Effects Of Reading Task Types On Senior High School Students’ Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

Vocabulary has the vital status in language learning.How to broaden the vocabulary size effectively is always a big challenge to many English learners.Various tasks are designed by researchers and teachers in order to improve students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition.Vocabulary gloss,as one effective way of language input has been studied to improve vocabulary acquisition by many researchers,meanwhile,content-retelling is also a positive method to promote incidental vocabulary acquisition and learners’ thinking ability.However,there are few studies on comparing vocabulary gloss with content retelling,especially their different effects on senior high school students’ English vocabulary acquisition.Based on the Input Hypothesis,Output Hypothesis and Involvement Load Hypothesis,three different tasks(the task of multiple-choice glosses,the task of content-retelling and the combining task of multiple-choice glosses with content-retelling)are chosen to study the effects of different reading tasks on incidental vocabulary acquisition and retention among senior high school students.152 students from Xi’an Senior High School attended this experiment,and they were divided into four groups with 38 participants in each group.Their English scores of senior high school entrance exam was adopted as the result of pretest,and analyses on that were given to make sure that four groups have no significant differences on their English proficiency and can be compared together.Target words were chosen in the pilot study which was conducted in pilot group(n=38)who would not attend the following experiment.Other three groups finished “multiple-choice glosses” task,“content retelling” task and the“combination of multiple-choice glosses with content-retelling” task respectively.After finishing different kinds of reading tasks,the immediate post-test as well as the delayed post-test were employed to all the participants.The data in this research are analyzed by SPSS 24.00,and conclusions from the analyses are given as follows: 1.)Among the task of multiple-choice glosses,the task of content retelling and the combination task of multiple-choice glosses with content-retelling,all of the three tasks have different effects on students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition.The combination task of multiple-glosses reading and content-retelling shares the highest mean score which means it has the most significant effect on students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition.In addition,the results also proves that multiple-choice glosses task as an input task is more effective to improve students’ IVA than content retelling task which is considered as an output task.2.)Three tasks also have different effects on students’ retention after IVA.In the delayed post-test,the combination task of multiple gloss reading and content retelling shares the highest mean score which means it has the most significant effect on students’ vocabulary retention.In addition,compared with the mean scores in immediate post-test with mean scores in delayed post-test,the content retelling task holds the least decrease among the three tasks.It is mainly because the content of passage is useful to keep students’ acquisition.Several implications and recommendations are offered for today’s English teaching.In a word,teachers should design more combination tasks which combine input and output together in order to promote students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition and retention.