과업의 관여도 차이가 우연적 어휘 학습에 미치는 영향

Abstract

The present study investigated the effects of task-induced involvement load on incidental vocabulary learning in Korean EFL context and whether each task actually induces the expected different levels of involvement load. A total of 207 English majors in two local universities participated in the study and were divided into two groups based on their L2 proficiency. During the experiment phase, all of the subjects were asked to read the same text and perform a randomly assigned task. The four types of tasks whose involvement load varied were: reading plus answering true-false questions, reading plus fill in gaps, reading plus completing a gapped text affixing the words, and reading plus a different type of fill in gaps. In order to ensure that the learners had no previous knowledge of target words, ten nonsense words were used as target words for the tasks. Following the completion of the task, the two immediate and delayed post-tests of vocabulary knowledge were conducted, and the mean scores of each task were compared. The result of a one-way analysis of variance showed that task-induced involvement load had a significant positive effect on incidental vocabulary learning for short-term and long-term. However, the effect of task-induced involvement load was not - viii - statistically significant for the participants with low-level proficiency. The result of a two-way analysis of variance showed no interaction effect between involvement load and L2 proficiency. In order to explore whether the different tasks induce different levels of involvement load, a survey designed to measure the amount of involvement occurring during the performance of the task was conducted. Additionally, think-aloud protocol was used to complement the survey instrument. The transcripts from the think-aloud protocol were analyzed in terms of the three factors which constitute involvement load: need, search, and evaluation. The result of the survey revealed that the group with the lowest involvement load achieved significantly lowest scores, and the group with the highest involvement load achieved significantly highest scores. However, the other two groups did not show a difference in their scores. The findings of think aloud protocol showed that by and large the different amount of involvement load was induced as previous studies have expected and also showed that there are some potential problems in the design of the experiment. The findings of the present study partially support Hulstijn & Laufer’s (2001) involvement load hypothesis and provide a general proof of the different amount of involvement load necessitated by several tasks. The implication of the research findings and pedagogical suggestions are discussed, and suggestions for future studies are provided.