Revisiting the Involvement LoadHypothesis: Awareness, Type of Task and Type of Item

A growing number of studies in recent years (Hulstijn, 1992; Jacobs, Dufon, & Hong, 1994; Watanabe, 1997; Rott, Williams & Cameron, 2002; Rott & Williams, 2003; Rott, 2005) have examined the effectiveness of several techniques to promote incidental vocabulary learning through reading, such as glossing (i.e., providing the meaning of obscure words in the margins of a text). Because texts provide learners with a rich input where lexical items are highly contextualized, the addition of some kind of lexical intervention might further nurture lexical development. However, studies investigating the effectiveness of different lexical intervention tasks during reading have led to conflicting results (e.g., Hulstijn, 1992; Watanabe, 1997). According to the Involvement Load Hypothesis proposed by Laufer and Hulstijn (2001), incidental tasks that trigger need, search and evaluation of the meaning of unfamiliar words will lead to higher vocabulary learning than those which do not trigger such processes. The notion of ‘involvement load’ includes both motivational (e.g., need) and cognitive components (e.g., search and evaluation). The researchers state that incidental tasks with a higher degree of involvement load are more conducive to the type of processing that is deemed crucial for learning. This hypothesis has important pedagogical implications, since it allows us to manipulate task features and predict what tasks will be more effective. However, more empirical evidence is needed in order to support it. In the present study, I interpret ‘incidental learning’ as a learning condition in which learners are processing language for meaning rather than for form (i.e., their goal is text comprehension rather than vocabulary learning) and unintentionally learn targeted forms and/or their meanings (Hulstijn, 2001; Robinson, 2002). Within this framework, learners may or may not pay attention to words and become aware of them while they are reading for meaning. Therefore, the notion of incidental learning is distinct from the notion of implicit learning, which takes place outside of awareness. While implicit learning can be incidental only, explicit learning can be both intentional and incidental. This view is different from others, where incidental learning is considered to occur when the object of learning is not the focus of attention (cf. Gass, 1999, for a discussion on different views of incidental vocabulary learning). Most studies that are premised on the role of involvement, attention and depth of processing in incidental vocabulary learning (Watanabe, 1997; Hulstijn & Laufer, 2001) have rarely employed process measures, such as think-aloud protocols. While attempts to measure different levels of language processing and awareness have been made in cognitive psychology and other areas of SLA, this task still needs to be undertaken in studies on incidental vocabulary learning. Moreover, many of these studies assume that learning will be incidental if learners are not instructed to learn the targeted words. However, in most cases no attempt is made to ensure that learners do not expect a vocabulary test and do not intend to learn the targeted words. Finally, while studies on intentional L2 vocabulary learning have showed that type of word – such as concrete vs. abstract nounsmight have an effect on vocabulary learning (De Groot & Keijzer, 2000), this issue remains mainly unexplored in the incidental vocabulary learning strand. The present study sought to investigate, within an attentional framework, the effect of three tasks with different degrees of involvement load on incidental L2 vocabulary development and text comprehension. In addition, it investigated different levels of awareness induced by the tasks, and addressed type of item ―concrete vs. abstract nouns― as a potential variable affecting incidental vocabulary development.