Efficacy of Task Type and Involvement Load on EFL Learners’ Vocabulary Knowledge

Abstract

This study attempted to investigate how task type and involvement load affected EFL learners’ receptive and productive lexical knowledge across time. A total of 74 participants were randomly assigned to one of four groups and each group learned 6 target words through reading with one of four form-focused tasks inducing different involvement load. The lexical gains of both receptive and productive knowledge were measured by immediate and delayed posttests. It was found that task type had a significant effect on the acquisition of L2 receptive knowledge across time. In terms of productive vocabulary knowledge, the effect of task type was only significant in the immediate test but not significant in the delayed test. The involvement load had no significant effect on the acquisition of L2 receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge across time. This result did not support the Involvement Load Hypothesis, indicating that the theory did not hold true across L2 vocabulary learning conditions and the three components of task-induced involvement, i.e., need, search and evaluation, might give no equal weight to their contributions to L2 vocabulary acquisition.