Autonomy Strengthens the Predictive Power of Involvement Load Hypothesis on Students' Productive Vocabulary Performance

Notwithstanding a proliferation of research on the Involvement Load Hypothesis (ILH), many practitioners remain divided over whether ILH could bolster students' productive vocabulary acquisition. The present study hypothesized that ‘autonomy’ could complement ILH in facilitating students' productive vocabulary performance. Two WeChat Applets (Applet 1.0 and Applet 2.0) were designed to help Chinese EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners apply productive vocabularies. Applet 1.0 was informed by ILH. Applet 2.0 was based on ILH with the added support of autonomous learning activities. Specifically, Applet 1.0 only provided reading materials. By contrast, learners who studied with Applet 2.0 could autonomously choose different learning materials embedded with the target words: videos, pictures and texts. To testify our hypothesis, we randomly selected two groups of students (N = 49) and divided them into a control group (CG, N = 26) and an experimental group (EG, N = 23). Both groups were asked to write a composition every week while learning with different Applets (CG learned with Applet 1.0 and EG studied with Applet 2.0). Three paragraph-writing tests (pre-test, post-test and delayed-test) were conducted to gauge students' productive vocabulary development. We found the EG performed significantly better than CG in terms of productive vocabulary learning in the post-test and delayed-test. Therefore, this paper suggested that autonomy could advance the effects of ILH and result in better productive vocabulary performance.