Immediately after the Involvement Load Hypothesis (Laufer and Hulstijn, 2001) emerged from the depth of processing, many researchers in SLA conducted experiments based on the assumptions from this hypothesis. They testified this
motivational-cognitive construct and explained their study results from this contention.
However, diverse experimental results emerged although they were based on the same proposal, the Involvement Load Hypothesis.
Several studies (Hulstijn & Laufer, 2001; Laufer, 2003; Tu, 2004; Keating,2008;
Kim, 2008; Martinez-Frenandez, 2008;Jing & Jianbin ,2009; Yaqubi et al, 2010;
Marmol & Sanchex-Lafuente,2013) compared tasks with different degrees of involvement loads to echo Laufer and Hulstijn’s request for further research on this motivational-cognitive construct. Tu (2004) and Kim (2008) replicated the three tasks in Hultsiin and Laufer (2001) in two paralleled experiments and found positive effect of task on vocabulary acquisition. The composition writing task (the high involvement load) outperformed the text fill-in task (the medium involvement load), and in turn the text reading task (the low involvement load).
Jing and Jianbin (2009) also compared three listening tasks and discovered listening with a composition writing excelled listening with relevant glosses, and listening with relevant glosses excelled listening with irrelevant glosses. The results confirmed the second assumption of the Involvement Load Hypothesis that “words which are processed with higher involvement load will be retained better than words which are processed with lower involvement load” (Laufer & Hulstijn, 2001).
Keating (2008) and Marmol & Sanchex-Lafuente (2013) also compared three learning tasks, the sentences writing task, the text fill-in task, and the text reading task.
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They found evidence partially supporting the Involvement Load Hypothesis. In Keating’s study, positive evidence only appeared in the active recall (L1 → L2 translation). The sentence writing task yielded a better effect than the text fill-in task, and the text fill-in task better than the text reading task. But in the passive recall (L2
→L1 translation), the significant difference only existed in the sentence writing task over the other two. Marmol and Sanchex-Lafuente (2013) successfully proved the superiority of sentence writing task over the text fill-in task, and the text fill-in task over the text reading task. However, the fourth task with the highest involvement load, sentences writing with looking up words, did not show its superiority over the previous three learning tasks.
In Martinez-Frenandez’ study (2008), the sentence/composition writing task was replaced by a text reading with multiple-choice glosses. Although the text fill-in group (involvement load=2) outperformed than the text reading group (involvement load=1), the text reading with multiple-choice glosses group (involvement load=3) showed a similar performance to the text reading group (involvement load = 1) and the control group (involvement load = 0). In Yaqubi et al.’s study (2010), the fill-in text task (involvement load=2) facilitated more vocabulary learning than the text reading task with looking-up the words (involvement load=3).
In order to testify the effectiveness of a task on incidental word learning is
conditional upon the involvement load, not on the form of the task, Kim (2008), Yaqubi et al. (2010), Laufer (2003), and Zou (2017) compared tasks with equal involvement load but in different task types. In Kim’s second experiment (2008), positive evidence was found from the comparison of the sentence writing task and the composition writing task. These two equal-weight learning tasks resulted in similar promotion on vocabulary acquisition anticipated by the Involvement Load Hypothesis. However, in Zou’s study (2017), negative evidence was found that sentences writing facilitated
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worse word learning than composition writing did, which required more metacognitive strategies to create a coherent context. Yaqubi et al. (2010) compared the reading task with looking-up words (input task) with the reading task with a summary writing (output task). The output task had a significantly better effect than the input task, which violated the assumption that equal load of involvement elicits equal amount of learning.
The counterevidence also appeared in the third experiment of Laufer’s study in 2003.
Three learning tasks with equal load revealed significant difference in promoting the vocabulary acquisition. Both the two output tasks (the sentence fill-in tasks with looking-up words and the sentence writing task) achieved a better effect than the input task (the text reading task with looking-up words). The significant different effect also appeared in the two output tasks in the delayed posttest.
To testify if a task with quality could compensate for the frequency of occurrence on incidental vocabulary learning, Folse (2006) and Lu (2013) compared a triple filling-in task with a writing task. Flose (2006) proved three fill-in-the-blank exercises yielded better effect than one sentence writing exercise when the time on task was controlled. Lu (2013) discovered the triple blank-filling group with less time consuming outperformed the summary writing group with more time consuming. The superiority of frequency of occurrence also appeared in the study conducted by Hulstijn, Hollander, Greidanus (1996), which compared the effect from the glosses, the dictionary, and the inference during the reading tasks under the 25-minute time constraint. In this study, the target word with three-time appearances retained better than the one with one show-up.
These findings violated the assumption that under the time constraint, a task with higher involvement load could result in equal learning as the several-retrieval task with a lower load.
These various findings on the Involvement Load Hypothesis promise the
significant promotion of learning tasks on the incidental vocabulary acquisition, but the
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controversial results bring out the necessity to explore the assumptions from the Involvement Load Hypothesis, especially on the degree of prominence of the three components. Besides, with positive or negative results, most of the previous studies sampled the intermediate or advanced adult FL or L2 learners, fewer experiments were conducted on the beginning learners, especially on junior high school students in Taiwan. Moreover, almost the above studies accepted Laufer’s perspective in which time is the essence of a task, needed not to be controlled, so the time consumed on task varied decreasingly from the task with higher load to the task with lower load. This leads to a possible explanation that one task outperforming than another in the vocabulary learning could be resulted from the immerging time, not the involvement load. Therefore, in this study, three learning tasks with different degrees of prominence on the component, evaluation, were adopted to reexamine the effectiveness of tasks on incidental vocabulary acquisition under the time constraint. The reading-comprehension task, the gap fill-in task, and the picture-writing task were chosen because they are commonly practiced as classroom activities in Taiwan and the commonly researched tasks in the previous studies, so here are my research questions:
(1) Are there any differences among the reading-comprehension task group, the gap fill-in task group, and the picture-writing task group on their immediate vocabulary posttest scores?
(2) Is there an interaction effect between tasks and reading proficiency on immediate vocabulary posttest scores?
(3) Are there any differences among the reading-comprehension task group, the gap fill-in task group, and the picture-writing task group on their delayed vocabulary posttest scores?
(4) Is there an interaction effect between task and reading proficiency on delayed vocabulary posttest scores?
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