Collocation learning and the ‘Involvement Load’ hypothesis

The ‘task-induced involvement load’ hypothesis (Laufer & Hulstijn, 2001) proposes that retention of previously unfamiliar words is conditional upon the amount of learners’ involvement while processing these words. Involvement is operationalised by tasks designed to differ in three motivational and cognitive dimensions: need, search and evaluation. The ‘need’ dimension is the motivational component of involvement. Laufer and Hulstijn (ibid) convincingly argue that there is at least one theory that explicitly incorporates the dimension of ‘need’ under motivation i.e. need creates tension. The researchers point out that a mild degree of tension could have a positive impact on information processing, and thus could indirectly affect learning. Accordingly, the dimension of ‘need’ exists in a task when the lexical item is perceived to be necessary for task completion.

On the other hand, ‘search’ and ‘evaluation’ are the two cognitive dimensions (information processing) of involvement. They are presumed to be dependent upon noticing and intentionally allocating attention to the form-meaning relationship. The researchers identified ‘search’ as the attempt to find the L2 lexis form expressing a given concept, or, conversely, to find the meaning of an unknown L2 lexis. Laufer and Girsai (2008a, b) suggest that examples of ‘search’ involve: trying to find the L2 translation of an L1 lexis by consulting a dictionary, or trying to guess and infer the meaning of an L2 lexis from context. Additionally, ‘evaluation’ denotes some sort of selective decision

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about the lexis’ form or meaning, based on a criterion of semantic and formal appropriateness of the lexis and its context. It also involves a comparison of a given lexical item with other lexical items, a specific meaning with its other meanings, or the lexical item with other lexical items, in order to assess whether a word does or does not fit its context. Laufer and Hulstijn (2001) have suggested two degrees of prominence for the ‘evaluation’ dimension i.e. moderate and strong. A ‘moderate evaluation’ involves recognising differences between lexical items (as in a fill-in task), or differences between several senses of a lexical item in a particular context. On the contrary, a ‘strong evaluation’ entails a decision as to how additional lexical items will combine with the new ones in an original sentence or text.

The proposal of the involvement hypothesis by Laufer and Hulstijn (2001) was an attempt to operationalise several concepts that have been used in connection with good retention, one of which is depth of processing. Originating from cognitive psychology, the depth of processing hypothesis proposed by Craik and Lockhart (1972) suggests that the likelihood of a piece of information to be committed to long-term memory depends on the depth with which it is initially processed in short-term memory. Based on this, the researchers have two further assumptions:

 Words processed with a higher involvement load will be retained better than those processed with a lower involvement load;

 Tasks designed with a higher involvement load will better facilitate vocabulary retention than those with a lower involvement load.

Empirical evidence in full or partial support of the involvement load hypothesis has been suggested (e.g.Hill & Laufer 2003; Laufer & Girsai, 2008a, b; Laufer & Hulstijn 2001; Tsai, 2011; Webb 2005). In her experimental studies, Laufer (2008a, 2008b) argued that translation tasks embody the three elements of need, search and evaluation. They entail ‘need’, because the words that have to be understood (when translating into L1), or produced (when translating into L2) are predetermined by the task. The element of search is present when learners, being unfamiliar with the L2 words, have to perform a search for their meaning when translating into L1, or a search for their forms when translating into L2. Most significantly, Laufer and Girsai (2008a, b) argued that an element of evaluation is necessary to perform a translation activity since there is typically more than one translation alternative for a particular sentence. Therefore, in carrying out a translation task, learners have to choose the alternative that fits the text they create. In the

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process of translation into L2, the learners’ decision will be based on the way other words in the text combine with the new word. According to the model of involvement, Laufer and Girsai (ibid) maintain that the evaluation element is strong. Finally, they postulate that translation tasks can be effective in vocabulary learning, since they are tasks with high involvement load.

This is very much true in relation to this research, however, due to the autonomous nature of the corpus-assisted contrastive analysis and translation approach, the involvement load is presumably higher than the load induced by the act of translation only. Similar to Laufer and Girsai’s (2008a, b) argument, the ‘need’ component is present as the learners will have to understand the target collocations in order to translate them into L1, or produce them when translating into L2 as required by the task. In the ‘search’ component, the learners in Laufer and Girsai’s studies (ibid) inferred meanings of the target lexical items from context or asked the teacher for them. Later they received a contrastive cross- linguistic explanation of the target lexical items provided by the teacher. As a result, this researcher considers the ‘search’ component of the load to be relatively moderate. In the autonomous approach proposed in this research, the learners are expected to ‘search’ and ‘evaluate’ the meanings and forms of the non-congruent target collocations through the consultations of bilingual corpus data. Accordingly, this researcher would hypothesise that the task design entails high involvement load engaging the learners in deeper processing which would render better retaining of the target non-congruent collocations.