Examining the Effectiveness of Reading Tasks Versus Listening Tasks in the Improvement of Vocabulary Learning in Iranian High School Learners Based on Vision Series: Dissecting the High School English Books [In English]

Exploring the relationship between listening skills and reading skills with the vocabulary level of students is a hot topic in the history of language teaching which has attracted the attention of many scholars in the field of ELT. Therefore, the present research study tried to probe the effect of reading passages and listening tasks on vocabulary retention and learning of Iranian male high school students based on the VISION series, the newly published English books in Iran for high school students. Sixty students were chosen and divided into two experimental groups, that is one experimental group for listening tasks and one experimental group for reading tasks. At first, a pretest was run to check their language level, especially their lexical level and then both groups went through treatment, and at the end, immediate and delayed posttests were run to check the retention and learning of new words. It should be noted that during the treatment sessions, the meaning of the new words was taught through L۱ translation, synonyms, and antonyms. In the reading section, the students should take a multiple choice exam of new words and for the listening section, the students went through answering the meaning of new words orally. After the treatment session, the students went through immediate and delayed posttest. The interval between immediate and delayed posttest was one month. The new words were chosen from the tenth-grade English book high school, that is, Vision۱. Then, by using SPSS software including mean comparison and descriptive statistics, the data were analyzed and the findings showed that both types of tasks, that is, reading and listening tasks had an effect on the improvement of vocabulary level of the students but the reading passages outperformed the listening passages. The mean of the reading group was ۱۶ and ۱۵ for both immediate and delayed posttests but the mean of the listening group was ۱۴ and ۱۳ respectively. Also, there was a significant difference between the means of both groups in both posttest ۱ and posttest ۲. All in all, the results disclosed that the reading section of the Vision series, especially Vision ۱ for tenth graders, is much more effective in the improvement of the vocabulary level of high school students compared to the listening section of Vision۱. The current findings and results could help teachers, material developers, and book authors.

Keywords:

Language Teaching , Reading Passages , Listening Tasks , Vocabulary Learning , Vocabulary Retention , Vision Series , Language Teaching , Reading Passages , Listening Tasks , Vocabulary Learning , Vocabulary Retention , Vision Series