Effects of Collaboration and Exercise Type on Incidental Vocabulary Learning: Evidence Against Involvement Load Hypothesis

This study examined effects of both collaboration and exercise type on learning vocabulary. Twenty seven Iranian learners of English received meaning and illustrative examples of the new target words through mini-dictionaries prepared for the study and practiced them both individually and collaboratively through two types of exercise: writing original sentence and a two-fill-in-the-blank. Their retention of the vocabulary was tested using vocabulary knowledge scale (VKS; Paribakht & Wesche, 1997). Data were analyzed using repeated measure ANOVA. Result showed that contrary to Involvement Load Hypothesis (Hulstijn and Laufer,2001), when time is held constant, exercise type does not make any significant difference in vocabulary retention. Result also showed that effect of collaboration depends on the exercise type.