A Trial of the Involvement Load Hypothesis in a Mixed-Ability ESP Class

This study is another trial of the Involvement Load Hypothesis in taskbased learning, stating that vocabulary acquisition and retention depend on the involvement load of a task. The novelty of this research lies in the hypothesis testing in a mixed ability ESP class and exploring the effects of involvement load added to a task on receptive and productive target word recall. Three tasks with different involvement indexes were given to a group of fifty-two students whose receptive and productive target word recall was tested immediately and two weeks later. The predictions of the hypothesis were confirmed, as the scores were the highest for the writing task, lower for the reading comprehension with a gap-fill and the lowest for the reading comprehension with words glossed. Most of the results comply with the hypothesis, while partial discrepancies draw our attention to the issue of time-on-task. This study introduces teachers of courses with a focus on vocabulary to some effective vocabulary learning task types which can accompany reading. Extensions left to future research are investigating the effect of time-on-task on task effectiveness and comparison of the effectiveness of two exercises with the same involvement load, but different output or input orientation.