The Effect of Reading Short Story and Form Focused Instruction on the Acquisition of Single Words of Iranian EFL Learners

The present study tried to investigate the effect of two types of vocabulary instruction: reading of short stories, and form focused instruction (FFI), on the acquisition of EFL students’ single words. Quantitative data from two experimental groups were collected and data has been analyzed.60 female EFL students ranged 13 to 17 years were assigned to two homogeneous groups based on their scores on QPT at Iran Language Institute (ILI) in Tehran, Iran. A teacher made Pre-test contained 50 single English words which were embedded in reading passages and sentences compiled by the researcher. On the basis of this pre-test, the researcher selected 30 single words unknown to most of the participants. Treatment was carried out over 10 sessions. In each session, the newly taught vocabularies were reviewed for students. Each group received a different treatment, in accordance with the experimental condition it was assigned to. The FFI (non-contrastive form-focused instruction) group received three form-focused tasks: meaning recognition of the target vocabulary (matching), and a text fill-in activity with the target words provided in a ‘word bank’ at the end of the text and true- false questions. The short story reading group was asked to perform two tasks, first to read the story books selected from Steps to Understanding aloud one by one and then he asked for the summary of that part in English in order to find out about their comprehension. After 10 sessions, the researcher - made post- test was applied. The Mann Whitney test was utilized to analyze the findings and so the hypothesis was rejected. The evidence from the present research suggests that there is indeed a place for communicative tasks such as short stories and brief contrastive analysis tasks in L2 teaching.

Keywords:

Vocabulary Acquisition , Form-focused Instruction , Reading Short Story