An Empirical Study On The Effects Of Input Mode And Task Involvement Load On Junior High School Students’ Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

In the field of second language acquisition(SLA),incidental vocabulary acquisition as a natural and unconscious way to acquire vocabulary has always been attached great importance to.A great deal of research has been conducted for the purpose of exploring how to promote learners’ incidental vocabulary acquisition in an effective way by investigating into the factors influencing incidental vocabulary acquisition under either reading input or listening input and making further comparisons between the effects of incidental vocabulary acquisition under different types of input modes,different tasks with different involvement loads and so on.However,most of them only focuses on the effects of a single variable such as input mode or task involvement load on incidental vocabulary acquisition.Additionally,the jury is still out on whether reading or reading-while-listening as the input mode performs better in the promotion of incidental vocabulary acquisition.Last but not least,there is a lack of research pertaining to the verification of Involvement Load Hypothesis under the input mode of reading-while-listening.Therefore,based on the previous studies,the current research intends to investigate not only the effects of input mode and task involvement load on incidental vocabulary acquisition,but also the interactive effects of the two as independent variables on it so as to enhance junior high school students’ vocabulary acquisition in an incidental way.The present research aims to provide some guidance in the promotion of junior high school students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition by tackling with the research questions as follows:(1)What are the effects of input mode on junior high school students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition?(2)What are the effects of task involvement load on junior high school students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition?(3)Are there any interactive effects of input mode and task involvement load on junior high school students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition?In this research,a total of 100 students from two parallel classes of Grade 8 from a junior high school in Changchun,Jilin Province were selected as the research participants who were randomly divided into four groups of Reading-whilelistening—High-involvement-load Group(LH-Group),Reading-while-listening—Low-involvement-load Group(LL-Group),Reading-Only—High-involvement-load Group(RH-Group),Reading-Only—Low-involvement-load Group(RL-Group).Each group was composed of 25 students.Additionally,another 25 students with the same vocabulary level were also invited into this research for a more reliable selection of target words.SPSS 27.0 was employed to analyze the collected data.Based on the data analysis,the research findings are summarized as follows:(1)Input mode as one independent variable did exert main effects on incidental vocabulary acquisition and the input mode of reading-while-listening performed better than the input mode of reading-only in promoting the participants’ incidental vocabulary acquisition under the same task involvement load.(2)Involvement load as the other independent variable had main effects on incidental vocabulary acquisition.Besides,groups engaging in tasks with high involvement load outperformed groups being treated with the low involvement load task with the input mode controlled to be the same.(3)There existed interactive effects of input mode and task involvement load on incidental vocabulary acquisition.Firstly,from the perspective of the effects of input mode,the effects of reading-while-listening input mode was more remarkable than reading-only input mode under the condition of high task involvement load.Additionally,with respect to the effects of task involvement load,the effects of high task involvement load were more prominent than that of low task involvement load when the input mode was reading-while-listening.By exploring the effects of input mode and task involvement load on junior high school students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition,this study offers certain references to traditional vocabulary teaching methods.Besides,to some extent,it also provides scientific basis and guidance for foreign language teachers to adopt appropriate input mode and design teaching tasks with reasonable involvement load so as to promote effective incidental vocabulary acquisition.