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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 24, No. 0, pp.554-567
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 31 Jan 2024
Received 18 Apr 2024 Revised 06 May 2024 Accepted 19 Jun 2024
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.24..202406.554

The Effects of Writing Tasks on Vocabulary Learning among Korean EFL Learners and Involvement Load Hypothesis

Chaehee Park
Associate Professor, Division of Foreign Languages Sunmoon University 70, Sunmoon-ro 221 Beon-gil, Tangjeong-myeon, Aasna-si Chungnam, Korea, 31460, South Korea, Tel: 041) 530-2423 chpark@sunmoon.ac.kr


© 2024 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to test whether the same amount of load of the two tasks contributes to the same amount of vocabulary learning among Korean EFL learners. Twenty nine Korea EFL university students participated in the task experiments (15 for sentence writing task, 14 for composition writing task). The participants’ performance was tested three times (pre-test, immediate post-test, and delayed post-test). It was found that both sentence writing and composition writing task were similarly effective for initial word-learning (short-term memory), whereas the latter group was stronger in word-retention (long-term memory) than the former group. The results indicated that the composition writing task requires learners to process target words in a deeper and meaningful way than the sentence writing task. It was suggested that the learners’ information process mechanism for unknown words is different in two tasks: somewhat different chunking in an associated context and hierarchical organization of information in two tasks also yielded different word learning (Zou 2017). Pedagogical implications for researchers and educators are discussed within the framework of involvement load hypothesis and information process mechanism.

Keywords:

involvement load hypothesis, L2 vocabulary learning, task load, second language learning

Acknowledgments

Partial data were presented at the conference of The Association of English Language and Literature in Korea in June 2021.

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