Abstract:
The purpose of the present study was to provide empirical
support for the construct of the involvement load hypothesis
(ILH) in an EFL context. To fulfill the purpose of the study, 4
intact groups consisting of 126 intermediate-level students
participated in this experiment. In order to ensure that the
participants were at the same level of English language
proficiency, the Nelson test was administered prior to the
treatment. Moreover, the participants were pretested on the
knowledge of the target items through the Vocabulary
Knowledge Scale (VKS). During the 7 treatment sessions, the 4
groups were treated with different tasks (reading, fill-in-theblanks,
sentence-writing, and composition-writing) varying in
the involvement index according to the ILH. The VKS was
administered twice (immediate and delayed posttests) to
measure the gain degree at receptive and productive levels.
The results indicated the validity of the hypothesis in receptive
and productive learning and receptive retention. In productive
retention, however, partial support for the hypothesis was
provided. In addition, vocabulary gain in partially known,
receptive, and productive categories could lend support to the effectiveness of each treatment over time.
Machine summary:
"In her second study, Kim had four groups of participants with two proficiency levels to which she randomly assigned a different task (composition or sentence-writing).
3. Research Questions To investigate the effectiveness of the ILH, the following research questions guided the study: 1) Is there any significant difference among the reading (R), filling-in- the-blanks (FIB), sentence-writing (SW) and composition-writing (CW) groups concerning the receptive and productive learning of the target items?
2) Is there any significant difference among the treatment groups (R, FIB, SW, and CW) concerning the receptive and productive retention of the target items?
000 2/3 1: Pre-test 2: Post-test 1 3: Post-test 2 The mean difference (see Table 11) between pretest and posttest 1 of each group signifies that the participants made significant receptive and productive gains at this time point.
Keating (2008) in his immediate posttest of active recall, Jing and Jianbin (2009), Nasrollahy Shahry (2010) for his lower-proficiency participants and Kim (2011) in her first experiment (delayed post-test) also reported the same results.
Concerning the third research question, the results of the receptive and productive gains over time indicated a significant trend for the four groups in comparison with the pretest scores.
The strong evaluation induced by the sentence-writing task leads to trace duration of the vocabulary knowledge (Laufer & Hulstijn, 2001) and a strong link with the output hypothesis (Swain, 1985)."