A Verification of Involvement Load Hypothesis on Chinese Adult English Learners

Shuyun Huang

doi:10.5539/ijel.v8n5p125

Abstract

The present research designed six tasks with various distributions of involvement components: need, search and evaluation to verify the predictability of Involvement Load Hypothesis on Chinese adult English learners. The results showed that the vocabulary exercises did facilitate the incidental vocabulary acquisition, but the exercise with higher involvement load did not necessarily benefit the students more than the exercise with lower involvement. Three components of involvement did not reveal the same effect on incidental vocabulary acquisition. And the superiority of exercise with higher involvement load existing in the immediate vocabulary test did not survive in the delayed vocabulary test. In the delayed vocabulary test there were not any statistically significant differences among six groups. The further analysis reported besides the cognitive processing aroused by the tasks, other critical factors also worked on the incidental vocabulary acquisition: inference skill and repetition of occurrence.

Highlights

There has been a long-running debate about which method is more effective for the learners to acquire vocabulary: direct instruction or incidental learning (Chen & Truscott, 2010; Hulstijn & Laufer, 2001; Laufer & Roitblat, 2011)
The present research designed six tasks with various distributions of involvement components: need, search and evaluation to verify the predictability of Involvement Load Hypothesis on Chinese adult English learners
The results showed that the vocabulary exercises did facilitate the incidental vocabulary acquisition, but the exercise with higher involvement load did not necessarily benefit the students more than the exercise with lower involvement

Summary

Introduction

There has been a long-running debate about which method is more effective for the learners to acquire vocabulary: direct instruction or incidental learning (Chen & Truscott, 2010; Hulstijn & Laufer, 2001; Laufer & Roitblat, 2011). Incidental vocabulary acquisition offers the language learners a rich context than the traditional meaning-form match. “A large amount of vocabulary is learned without an overt intention, in other words, incidentally” (Ender, 2016). Many studies have been conducted to investigate different aspects of incidental vocabulary acquisition, including the types of multimodal input; the frequency of the target words; the work of marginal glosses and dictionary; the modification of input like typographical enhancement (Chen & Truscott, 2010; Ellis &Le, 2016; Folse, 2006)

Results

Discussion

Conclusion