The Effect of Listening to English-Persian Sets of Words on Preschoolers’ Vocabulary Learning

This study investigates the effect of a bilingual technique, namely listening to English-Farsi sets of words by means of incidental vocabulary learning on Iranian Pre-school learners’ Vocabulary Learning. To this aim, participants from two intact classes were assigned to the Control Group (n=25) and the Experimental Group (n=28), respectively. Both groups were taught 50 new words within a span of nine sessions in accordance with the regular method of teaching vocabulary to preschoolers in EFL classes. The only difference was that the Experimental Group had an audio recording of English-Persian sets of words related to the target words taught in each session as an incidental listening intervention program. A teacher made vocabulary test was used to record the progress of both groups from pre to posttest. Descriptive statistics of gain scores showed that both groups demonstrated some progress from pretest to posttest. However, analysis using a Mann Whitney U test, comparing the vocabulary gain scores obtained from both groups, showed that the experimental group who participated in the intervention program outperformed those who did not. Thus, it was concluded that introducing English-Farsi sets of words through incidental listening can have a comparatively significant impact on Iranian Pre-school learners’ vocabulary learning. This finding is important since it shows how this intervention can be one of the means by which the lack of exposure to sufficient quantities of language input normally faced by young EFL learners be compensated.

Keywords:

Incidental Listening , Incidental Vocabulary Learning