چکیده:
Vocabulary is an important component in all four skills of
language. Issue of vocabulary retention has great importance to EFL
teachers in instructional contexts because they always observe students
forget the words which are taught to them after a short period of time.
The current study investigates whether the use of an interactive webbased
tool referred to as „Wordsift‟ can result in a significant
improvement in long-term vocabulary retention of EFL students. 60
participants were selected to take part in the study.The participants‟
age ranged from 17 to 24. They were taught 100 words in six
contextualized texts. The main experiment consisted of twelve
sessions, which were followed by an additional meeting designed to
check the treatment effect on the long-term vocabulary retention. The
results of T-test and ANOVA analyses indicated that word cloud
(Wordsift) does have positive significant effect on EFL learners‟ longterm
vocabulary retention.
خلاصه ماشینی:
"Considering the close relationship between EFL learners‟ vocabulary command and their ability to understand English readings, researchers have been searching for ways to effectively enhance students' acquisition and retention of learned vocabulary knowledge (Min & Min, 2008).
If the interaction between different types of media such as audio, text, picture, and animation presented to the learners is thought to be a considerable help in memorizing words (Dubois & Vial, 2000), then it becomes important to examine if interactive web-based tools such as Wordsift would improve students‟ vocabulary learning.
But before starting the treatment, it was necessary for the researcher to know how many of the words were known to the students to check the effectiveness of the Wordsift on the long- term vocabulary retention.
In addition, the data collected from the post-test administration to the participants after two weeks of intervention was also analyzed by the T-test and one-way ANOVA formula to examine the effectiveness of the treatment and also to identify the changes that took place as an outcome of instruction given to the groups as well as the differences in the long-term vocabulary retention among them.
One possible reason for better long-term retention in the experimental group is that, EFL textual information was not as easily processed as that of picture and text information, and, as a result, the picture supplemented or strengthened the learning and retaining of the words.
In this study Wordsift, particularly by providing concept maps including synonymous and antonymous and different parts of speeches of a word facilitates integrating students‟ prior knowledge to new stimuli which leads to better learning and long term retention."