Abstract:
This study was an attempt to investigate whether teaching critical reading strategies had any significant effect on intermediate EFL learners’ vocabulary retention. To fulfill the purpose of this study, 72male and female students within the age range of 17 to 32 yearsstudying at Farzan and Farzanegan language schools in Tehran at intermediate level were selected from a total number of 114 participants based on their performance on a piloted PET (2009) and a piloted teacher-made vocabulary recognition test and assigned to the experimental and control groups of 36 participants each. The same content (eight reading texts) was taught to both groups throughout the 19-session treatment with the only difference that the experimental group was taught critical reading strategies while in the control group the common comprehension-based approach was applied. At the end of the instruction, the piloted vocabulary retention post-test parallel to the vocabulary pre-test was administered to the participants of both groups after an interval of two weeks. Finally, the mean scores of both groups on the post-test were compared through an independent samples t-test which led to the rejection of the null hypothesis. Thus, teaching critical reading strategies proved to have a significant effect on intermediate EFL learners’ vocabulary retention.
Machine summary:
com This study was an attempt to investigate whether teaching critical reading strategies had any significant effect on intermediate EFL learners’ vocabulary retention.
To fulfill the purpose of this study, 72male and female students within the age range of 17 to 32 yearsstudying at Farzan and Farzanegan language schools in Tehran at intermediate level were selected from a total number of 114 participants based on their performance on a piloted PET (2009) and a piloted teacher-made vocabulary recognition test and assigned to the experimental and control groups of 36 participants each.
This point is well supported by Beck, McKeown, and Kucan (2003) who state that former methods of vocabulary instruction, which required students to view definitions before reading a text and then perform on a quiz or figure out new vocabulary meaning from the context, proved to be less effective than once thought.
In fact, as Hieber, Lehr, and Osborn (2004, as cited in Austermuehle, Kautz, & Sprenzel, 2007) maintain, having a classroom rich in oral language and discussions about the text and exposing students to new words in the text will provide opportunities for learning to occur.
Since the course was a reading course, the students were not told that they would take a vocabulary retention post- test and the interval of two weeks was chosen because less than this time the students might use their short-term memory to answer the questions and in more than two weeks further learning may occur (Pishghadam, Khodadady, & Khoshsabk, 2010).