The weight of involvement load in college level reading and vocabulary tasks

This study provides some evidence in support of the Involvement Load Hypothesis proposed by Laufer & Hulstijn (2001) which claims that tasks inducing high levels of need , search , and evaluation of meanings of unfamiliar words are most effective for vocabulary acquisition. Immediate and delayed retention of ten unfamiliar words taken from a short story reading text were investigated in learning conditions of varying "Involvement Loads". These were: low, glossary provided; moderate, multiple choice glossary; high, dictionary based sentence production; and control, reading only. Participants were 118 students from seven intact ESL college level classes at a Montréal area college. On an immediate retention test, there was a statistically significant difference between the means from both the multiple choice glossary task and dictionary based sentence production task and the control group. For delayed retention, there was a statistically significant difference only between the means from the multiple choice glossary task and the control group results. With a view to addressing unanswered questions in previous Involvement Load research regarding how learners undertake reading comprehension and vocabulary tasks, the present study included a qualitative aspect in which ten participants provided concurrent think aloud protocols whilst completing vocabulary reading tasks of moderate and high involvement loads. Think aloud protocols provided valuable insights into both search and evaluation strategies used in lexical intervention tasks; furthermore it was clear that metalinguistic knowledge of parts of speech and etymology were enabling strategies. The protocols also highlighted the relative weight of 'need' in calculations of task Involvement Load as participants indicated a clear preference for the structure and format of multiple choice glossary task