Promoting Railway Engineering Students’ Knowledge of Domain Specific Vocabulary and their Self-Regulation through the Use of Vocabulary-Learning Scaffolding Strategies

Scaffolding strategy is among the most efficient teaching techniques improving the performance of learners,especially in academic environments, and one of the ultimate goals of which is to help students become self-regulated intheir learning (Zimmerman, 2011). Thus, this study aimed to explore the effect of scaffolding strategies on students’vocabulary learning and self-regulation. The participants of this study were 15 undergraduate students of RailwayEngineering at the Iran University of Science and Technology. The instruments were a test of technical vocabulary anda questionnaire on self-regulation of vocabulary learning. Within a three-week period students were given scaffoldinginstructions on domain specific vocabulary. Finally, they took the posttest and the self-regulated vocabulary learningquestionnaire to which an open-ended question was added. The results of the study showed improvement in students’scores on the posttest implying the positive effect of implementing scaffolding strategy instruction on the RailwayEngineers’ knowledge of domain-specific words. On the other hand, although students’ use of self-regulated strategieswas promoted, this change was not statistically significant, which could be caused by the short time period of thetreatment. The finding of this study has shed some light into the use of scaffolding and self-regulated strategies inacademic English as significant difference was found in students’ performance after receiving scaffolding on domainspecificvocabulary items.

Keywords:

vocabulary knowledge , domain-specific vocabulary , scaffolding strategy , self-regulated learning , selfregulatingstrategies