The design and the findings of the study present its limitations which are needed to be explored in further research.
On Design and Treatment
In terms of design, the participants went through the same task for three times, which made some active students anticipate the coming immediate posttest when they encountered the task again. This intention may confound the results of the experiment.
For further studies, the learning task should be applied to each participant just one time to prevent the influence from the participants’ expectation.
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For the texts, reading texts are 150-word narratives, which are short and familiar to the participants. The familiarity and the easy access help the participants catch the main idea of the reading passage without too much attention to individual words, which might not lead to word learning at a deeper level. The reading text could be a longer expository to creates a more complicate situation for participants to find out.
For the task, the tasks in the study are 10-min activities, which may not be long enough to facilitate the deep processing. Elaborative thinking needs time to go further.
In addition, the answer to the reading-comprehension task and the gap fill-in task needs to be provided for the students to learn the accurate meaning.
For the reading proficiency test, since the junior high school students are regarded as beginning English learners, even if they come with different levels of language proficiency, the variance among them may not be large enough to be categorized into two different proficiency levels. Therefore, for further research, if the proficiency level is going to be taken into account, participants at varied grade levels are suggested to be involved.
For data collection procedure, the assignment of participants to each treatment group should be done after, instead of prior to, the pretest so that there would be no participants eliminated due to the knowledge of target words and the homogeneity of treatment groups and subgroups needs not to be testified after data reduction.
On Measurement, the VKS is a 5-scale assessment, which is too complicated for junior high school students to answer. It is sometimes difficult for participants to choose a suitable statement to reflect their real learning state. Maybe the future studies can administer a revised VKS with only three categories, which are category I “I don’t remember having seen this word before”, category II “I have seen the word before, and I think it means _____”, and category III “I can use this word in a sentence: ______.
(write a sentence.)”
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On Results
In this study, although no positive evidence is found to support the assumptions of the Involvement Load Hypothesis, this motivational-cognitive structure provides researcher and teachers the basic elements to consider or manipulate when conducting a task-based learning. However, the involvement load might interact with other elements, such as time-on-task, frequency of occurrence, word retrieval, and individual factors, leading to the un-stability of evaluation index. In other words, the difference among the three learning tasks may not be more or less than one plus. For further research, the most essential element of the Involvement Load Hypothesis, evaluation needs to be testified through the comparison in terms of frequency of occurrence under the time controlled, with advanced or intermediate learners. Then it could be investigated with involvement load more clearly indexed.
Conclusion
The study investigates the effects of contextualized learning tasks on vocabulary acquisition and retention based on the Involvement Load Hypothesis. Although no positive evidence is found to support the assumption that tasks with higher load result in better vocabulary acquisition and retention, the findings shed light on the advantages of three contextualized learning tasks in vocabulary acquisition and retention for learnes with different proficiency levels.
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