The Effect of Contextualized Vocabulary Teaching Procedure on Iranian High School Students’ Performance in Final Vocabulary Achievement Test

The current study was conducted to determine whether contextualized vocabulary teaching procedure has any effect on Iranian high school students’ performance in final vocabulary achievement test or not. Achieving this purpose, theresearchers chose 40 homogenous students (samples) out of 80 initial participants on the basis of Oxford PlacementTest (OPT) as a standardized test. The participants of the current research were selected from Chahardangeh district(located in Mazandaran, Iran) aging from 15 to 17 and studied in high school. Since one of the researcher taught atschool in which the accessibility to his students was easy, convenience sampling (availability sampling) was used. Then, they randomly divided these 40 students in two 20 member groups and by flipping the coin, named them asexperimental and control groups. The researchers made a test the reliability of which was estimated in a pilot studyabout 0.78. It was implemented as a pretest both for experimental and control group. Then, teaching vocabularies inthe form of a context (one or two sentences) as a treatment was done in the experimental group, while in control group, vocabularies were taught decontextually i.e. through usual and to some extent traditional method like wordlists and translation. After 5 weeks, the posttest was implemented and the data were analyzed by using SPSS software. The researchers used descriptive and inferential statistics to make an inference considering the characteristics of a scientific research study. Applying statistical procedures like calculating mean, variance, standard deviation, T-test,etc. and analyzing the results, the research developers finally concluded that the contextualized procedure was effective and led to an improvement on the performance of the experimental group during this study.

Keywords:

Contextualized , Decontextualized , High school students , Vocabulary achievement test , Vocabulary teaching