Vocabulary Retention and Recall

The present study examined the effect of four types of post reading-based tasks with different index of task-induced involvement load (Laufer & Hulstijn, 2001) on EFL learners’ recognition and recall of unfamiliar L2 vocabularies. To this end, 88 intermediate EFL learners were randomly assigned to four groups and were instructed to employ four different tasks after reading two narrative texts: (1) simple sentence writing; (2) text summary writing; (3) creative sentence writing; and (4) imaginary story writing. A day after the output activity session, the participants took two post-tests: the production test and the recognition test. Three weeks later, the delayed post-tests were administered. Mixed ANOVA (Split-plot) was run to compare the performances of the groups on immediate and delayed post-tests. The results revealed that there were overall significant within-group and between-group differences among four groups of the study both in immediate and delayed posttests. The creative sentence writing group outperformed in comparison to the other three groups. The results of this study turned out to be partially consistent with involvement load hypothesis.