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EFL learners in two countries participated in two parallel experiments testing whether retention of vocabulary acquired incidentally is contingent on amount of taskinduced involvement. Short-and long-term retention of ten unfamiliar words was investigated in three learning tasks (reading comprehension, comprehension plus filling in target words, and composition-writing with target words) with varying "involvement loads"-various combinations of need, search, and evaluation. Time-on-task, regarded as inherent to a task, differed among all three tasks. As predicted, amount of retention was related to amount of task-induced involvement load: Retention was highest in the composition task, lower in reading plus fill-in, and lowest in the reading. These results are discussed in light of the construct of task-induced involvement.

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The present study investigates the use of English verb-noun collocations in the writing of native speakers of Hebrew at three proficiency levels. For this purpose, we compiled a learner corpus that consists of about 300,000 words of argumentative and descriptive essays. For comparison purposes, we selected LOCNESS, a corpus of young adult native speakers of English. We retrieved the 220 most frequently occurring nouns in the LOCNESS corpus and in the learner corpus, created concordances for them, and extracted verb-noun collocations. Subsequently, we performed two types of comparisons: learners were compared with native speakers on the frequency of collocation use and learners were compared with other learners of different second-language proficiencies on the frequency and correctness of collocations. The data revealed that learners at all three proficiency levels produced far fewer collocations than native speakers, that the number of collocations increased only at the advanced level, and that errors, particularly interlingual ones, continued to persist even at advanced levels of proficiency. We discuss the results in light of the nature of collocations and communicative learning and suggest some pedagogical implications.

In this article, we describe the development and trial of a bilingual computerized test of vocabulary size, the number of words the learner knows, and strength, a combination of four aspects of knowledge of meaning that are assumed to constitute a hierarchy of difficulty: passive recognition (easiest), active recognition, passive recall, and active recall (hardest). The participants were 435 learners of English as a second language. We investigated whether the above hierarchy was valid and which strength modality correlated best with classroom language performance. Results showed that the hypothesized hierarchy was present at all word frequency levels, that passive recall was the best predictor of classroom language performance, and that growth in vocabulary knowledge was different for the different strength modalities. Vocabulary Knowledge and Vocabulary TestsVocabulary tests are contingent upon the test designer's definition of lexical knowledge. Lexical knowledge, in turn, has

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In the first part of the paper, I challenge some basic assumptions underlying the claim that reading is the major source of vocabulary acquisition in L2: the 'noticing' assumption, the 'guessing ability' assumption, the 'guessing-retention link' assumption, and the 'cumulative gain' assumption. In the second part, I report on three experiments in which vocabulary gains from reading were compared with gains from word-focused tasks: completing given sentences, writing original sentences, and incorporating words in a composition. Results showed that more words were acquired through tasks than through reading. Résumé : Dans la première partie de l'article, je remets en question quatre hypothèses basées sur l'idée que la lecture est le principal moyen d'acquisition du vocabulaire en L2, soit celle de la prise de conscience (noticing), celle concernant la déduction du sens (guessing), celle de la relation entre la déduction et la rétention, et celle du gain cumulatif. Dans la seconde partie, je rends compte de trois expériences dans lesquelles on compare les progrès dus à la lecture à ceux qui résultent de tâches lexicales consistant à compléter des phrases, à en formuler de nouvelles et à intégrer des mots dans des textes. Les résultats montrent que l'on acquiert plus de vocabulaire en exécutant ces tâches qu'en lisant des textes.