Impact of Vocabulary Learning Tasks on Communicative Gains of Advanced EFL Learners of Persian

摘要

The extent to which receptive and productive vocabulary learning tasks affect the development of L2 lexical knowledge and the conditions which can help the learners to acquire L2 words through appropriate classroom instructions have been matters of great concern to the practitioners in L2 vocabulary research.. This paper investigated the effects of receptive and productive learning from word pairs on comprehension, and the use of taught words in writing in advanced EFL learners of Persian. To this end, a quick Oxford Placement Test (OPT) was administered to the senior students population studying English teaching in Shahrekord Azad university ,and based on their OPT scores, a samples of 40 male and female students was selected and randomly assigned to two equal groups of 20 each. One group was taught 15 target words receptively while another group learned the same target words productively. After the treatments, two tests measuring reading comprehension and writing were administered to each group. The scores of the groups were analyzed via a one-way MANOVA. The results indicated that those who had learned their target words productively outperformed the receptive participants on the writing test significantly. Similarly, the receptive group did significantly better on the reading comprehension test than the productive group. The findings of this study revealed that receptive vocabulary learning may be more beneficial to understanding a text and productive learning is more effective in improving the use of students’ taught words in writing. The results of this study can benefit teachers and students to become aware of the merits and demerits of vocabulary learning tasks, and help them to select the tasks that best suit their needs.