Vocabulary acquisition through cloze exercises, sentence-writing and composition-writing: Extending the evaluation component of the involvement load hypothesis

Abstract

This research inspects the allocation of involvement load to the evaluation component of the involvement load hypothesis, examining how three typical approaches to evaluation (cloze-exercises, sentence-writing, and composition-writing) promote word learning. The results of this research were partially consistent with the predictions of the hypothesis: the two writing tasks with greater involvement load led to significantly better word learning than cloze-exercises with lower load, while composition-writing was significantly more effective than sentence-writing despite the same involvement load according to the matrix of the original model. Such results are explained from the perspectives of information organization and pre-task planning, based on which evaluation induced by cloze-exercises is suggested to be allocated with ‘moderate evaluation’ as it involves no use of chunking, hierarchical organization or pre-task planning, evaluation induced by sentence-writing with ‘strong evaluation’ as it involves chunking and pre-task planning at the sentence level, and evaluation induced by composition-writing with ‘very strong evaluation’ for it involves chunking, hierarchical organization and pre-task planning at the composition level.