An Empirical Study on Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition of Different Task-induced Involvement Loads in College English Listening Class

Abstract

Vocabulary learning is crucial in second language acquisition. How to motivate and promote students’ vocabulary acquisition in the process of teaching has long been viewed as a key task in the field of SLA. Based on Involvement Load Hypothesis, two college English classroom listening tasks are designed in this study for the purpose of investigating subjects’ performance in L2 incidental vocabulary acquisition word gain. Then raw data collected from the experiment are processed by SPSS 13.0. The results of the study support Involvement Load Hypothesis, i.e. tasks that induce higher involvement load surpass remarkably lower-involvement-load tasks in IVA word gain and retention.