The Effect Of Output Task Types On High School Students’ Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Through Audiovisual Input

Vocabulary is an integral part of language,and lexical knowledge plays an essential role in second language acquisition.Incidental vocabulary knowledge,which occurs when learners unconsciously acquire certain words through such activities as reading and listening,can help learners expand their vocabulary size.Now there exist a large number of domestic studies whose focus is on incidental vocabulary acquisition.However,most of them are reading-based and target college students.Therefore,the current study tries to analyze the effect of different output tasks on high school students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition after the audiovisual input and aims to test the involvement load hypothesis in Chinese high schools.The current research mainly involves two aspects: the effect of different output tasks on the uptake and retention of incidental vocabulary,and the possible underlying reasons.The participants were 109 high school students,who were divided into four groups—each consisting of around 27 students with similar language proficiency and listening skills.After watching the same Ted-talk,the four groups were required to finish four different tasks: Group 1,the control group,reading the script again;Group2 filling the blanks with glosses;Group 3 filling the blanks with dictionary;Group 4writing an original sentence with each target word.According to the involvement hypothesis,the involvement load of each group was 0,2,3,3.After finishing tasks,all the participants received the immediate and delayed post-test two weeks later.After the delayed post-test,12 participants,who were randomly chosen from the four groups,were interviewed.The study has the following three conclusions.First,different tasks bring out different uptake and retention effects(F1(3,105)=7.689,p1=0.000;F2(3,105)=5.330,p2=0.002).Among the four tasks,sentence writing leads to the most effective uptake and retention results.However,the current study can only partially support the involvement load hypothesis.Second,there are four possible reasons why sentence writing brings out the best results: having a stronger degree of “evaluation”,helping form the connection between the target words and original vocabulary knowledge;activating background knowledge;featuring a higher degree of flexibility for learners with different English proficiency;having a higher degree of generation.Third,incidental vocabulary acquisition should be highly valued as an effective supplement to intentional vocabulary teaching activities.Involvement load can be used as a helpful index to help maximize the acquiring rate of vocabulary and frequent repetition should be considered to help maximize the retention rate when teachers assign vocabulary tasks.