Abstract:
The present study aimed at investigating whether vocabularylearning
strategies had any impact on the vocabulary learning of Iranian EFL
learners. The participants of the study were 67 male and female undergraduate
university students, majoring in English Translation and English Literature at
Islamic Azad University, North Tehran Branch, who were taking “Reading
Comprehension II” course. In order to ascertain that the participants were
homogeneous in terms of their general language proficiency, a standardized
proficiency test was administered. Subsequently, a standardized achievement test,
which was prepared by the researchers based on the students’ course book,
consisting of 60 items, was administered to the participants to examine whether
they were familiar with the target words to be taught during the treatment.
Throughout the four-month semester and during 20 sessions, the participants were
instructed to focus on three vocabulary-learning strategies. The subjects in the first
group were trained to use bilingual and monolingual dictionaries; those in the
second group were taught to guess the meaning of new lexical items from the
context; and the subjects in the third group were trained to use different texts to
understand the meaning of words appropriately. In order to create the opportunity
for the researchers to trace the vocabulary learning, a posttest, the same as the test
used in the pretest, was administered to the participants of the study. Paired
samples t-tests proved that using vocabulary-learning strategies had a positive
impact on vocabulary learning in each of the groups. Additionally, the one-way
analysis of variance (ANOVA) indicated a significant difference among the three
groups. Finally, the result of Scheffé’s post hoc test showed that those participants
who worked on text-specific activation strategy as a vocabulary learning strategy
outperformed the subjects in the other two groups.
Machine summary:
"ABSTRACT: cooperative dictionary use strategy, interactive guessing from context strategy, collaborative text-specific activation strategy, vocabulary learning Keywords: Vocabulary instruction has undergone many changes, along with other mutable aspects of Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language (TESL/TEFL).
Although teaching programs have witnessed a shift in their approach toward vocabulary learning and teaching recently, there is still an ongoing search to find ways, which can help learners to expand their vocabulary knowledge (Richards & Renandya, 2002).
There are several approaches to elevate the vocabulary learning process: (a) incidental learning in which vocabulary learning is a product of doing other activities as reading or listening; (b) explicit instruction (Richards & Renandya, 2002 ) in which learners should identify specific vocabulary acquisition; and (c) independent strategy development in which learners are taught strategies for inferring words from context, as well as those strategies which help learners retain the meanings of words they have learned."