Педагогические науки /5. Современные методы преподавания.

Zhakenova G. K., Gaurieva G. M

Eurasian National university, Kazakhstan

Effect of vocabulary teaching to improve students reading comprehension

Abstract: This study aims at investigating the impact of vocabulary teaching strategies on improving students reading comprehension skills. The sample of the study consisted of 55 students studying at school lyceum № 1 for gifted children. They were assigned to both experimental and control groups. A vocabulary and reading comprehension pre-test was given to both groups at the beginning of the study to get sure that were equivalent and homogenous. The experimental group was taught vocabulary and reading texts explicitly and implicitly, while the control group was taught in the traditional vocabulary teaching method. The same vocabulary and reading comprehension pre-test was given as a post-test at the end of the treatment. The gathered data out of the Pre-post Test were statistically analyzed, and the findings were obtained. The findings revealed significant differences between the control and experimental groups in favor of the experimental one. The combination of explicit and implicit vocabulary strategies has proved to be effective in increasing students' vocabulary size, and as a result, in improving their reading comprehension skills.

Keywords: explicit/implicit vocabulary teaching strategy, traditional vocabulary teaching method, reading comprehension

I. Introduction

Improving students' reading comprehension is a goal which every responsible teacher tries hard with his students to achieve. The mastery of reading comprehension skills is the key for students to get well with most content courses. Vocabulary knowledge plays an important role in reading comprehension. Reading a language and comprehending it require that one possesses sufficient vocabulary. The importance of vocabulary can be defined as "the words we must know to communicate effectively: words in speaking (expressive vocabulary) and words in listening (receptive vocabulary)". [1]

Vocabulary teaching is one of the most important components of any language classroom which helps learners understand languages and express their meanings. Vocabulary is a principle contributor to comprehension. Fluent readers recognize and understand many words, and they read more quickly and easily than those with smaller vocabularies. Students with large vocabularies understand text better and score higher on achievement tests than students with small vocabularies.

"One of the oldest findings in educational research is the strong relationship between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension. Word knowledge is crucial to reading comprehension and determines how well students will be able to comprehend the texts they read in middle and high school" [2] The correlation of word knowledge with reading comprehension indicates that if students do not adequately and steadily grow their vocabulary knowledge, their reading comprehension will be affected [3]. Writers Cunningham A. E. and Stanovich K. E. also say that students who do not understand some words in texts tend to have difficulty comprehending and learning from those texts. [4]

Knowledge of vocabulary is one of the best predictors of reading ability and the capability to obtain new details from texts. The relationship between vocabulary and reading comprehension is a “vigorous” one and the knowledge of the vocabulary system of a language has constantly been the “foremost indicator of a text’s difficulty” [5] Different articles and studies have focused on the effect of teaching vocabulary implicitly or explicitly to improve students reading comprehension, while very few articles and studies have tackled the impact of combining both vocabulary teaching techniques on improving students' reading comprehension skills. Ellis N.C claims that implicit vocabulary teaching and learning method involves indirect or incidental, whereas the explicit method involves direct or intentional. [6]

Thus, selecting the correct or the most efficient technique or strategy to introduce vocabulary items is an integral factor in improving EFL students' reading comprehension. Researchers have also suggested that vocabulary knowledge is an indicator of language ability and in order to be a competent second or foreign language learner, a great amount of words is a dominant factor. Hence, such vocabulary knowledge is also required for successful reading comprehension. [7]

Statement of the Problem

Most English instructors complain that their students suffer a lot from being unable to comprehend reading texts because they lack the required size of vocabulary to understand the target texts. Therefore, Students are not successful in reading comprehension due to their deficiency in vocabulary. Unknown words hinder students from understanding the reading texts and the given questions as well. Therefore, it is very important to attempt and examine various vocabulary teaching techniques and strategies so as to find the most effective ones which may help a lot in developing students' vocabulary, and as a result, to improve their reading comprehension skills. Thus the purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of a combination of explicit and implicit vocabulary strategies on the development of EFL learners' vocabulary and improving their reading comprehension skills.

II. METHODOLOGY

Design of the Study

The experimental design for this study was a quantitative design. Specifically, the design was a quasi-experimental Pretest-posttest experimental design which was used to investigate the effectiveness of using a combination of vocabulary implicit/explicit teaching strategies to develop students' vocabulary and to improve their reading comprehension.

Sample of the Study

Two parallel groups from the 9^th grade students at school lyceum № 1 for gifted children, Kazakhstan participated in this study. There were 55 students in the two groups, ranging from 15 to 16 in age. The control group consisted of 28 students, and the experimental one consisted of 27 students.

Instrument of the Study

A vocabulary-reading comprehension Pre-posttest was used before commencing the treatment and at its end.

To find out the equality of means and standard deviations of students' performance on the pre-test, the Independent Samples T-Test was applied.

Pre-test. Table (1)

Students’ abilities	Group	The number of right answers (approximate)
Students’ reading comprehension	Control group	12/25
	Experimental group	11/25
Students’ Vocabulary	Control group	10/25
	Experimental group	12/25
Total	Control group	22/50
	Experimental group	23/50

Table (1) shows that there were no significant differences on the pre-test between experimental and control groups in relation to the students' size of vocabulary and reading comprehension, which means that students in both groups were equivalent.

Definition of Terms

Explicit/ Implicit Vocabulary Teaching Strategy

This includes a combination of explicit and implicit teaching strategies to teach the vocabulary items in certain reading texts. This combination includes the teaching of some key words explicitly (directly) by using different techniques such as giving definitions, using synonyms and antonyms, word collocations. etc. before asking students to read the assigned texts silently, and then to teach independent word-learning strategies which mainly depend on the included contextual clues.

Traditional Vocabulary Teaching Method

This method depends on listing and defining most new words, using English/Russian translation dictionaries, and then asking them to memorize the meanings in English and in Russian.

Vocabulary

Vocabulary can be defined as the words we must know to communicate effectively: words in speaking (expressive vocabulary) and words in listening (receptive vocabulary).

Reading Comprehension

It is the ability to read a certain text, to process it skillfully and to understand its major and minor ideas.

III.THE FINDINGS OF THE STUDY

Post-test. Table (2)

Students’ abilities	Group	The number of right answers (approximate)
Students’ reading comprehension	Control group	18/25
	Experimental group	23/25
Students’ Vocabulary	Control group	17/25
	Experimental group	22/25
Total	Control group	35/50
	Experimental group	45/50

Table (2) shows that there were significant differences between pre-test and the post-test, it also indicates that there was tremendous contrast between the control group and the experimental group in favor of the experimental one.

The findings of the study indicated that there were significant differences between the mean scores of students in the experimental group and those in the control group in favor of the experimental group attributed to the use of explicit/implicit vocabulary teaching strategies. It seems that the combination between the explicit and implicit vocabulary teaching strategies has led to a very good progress in the total EFL students' language performance. Introducing the meanings of the key words prior to starting reading the assigned text helped students a lot in getting good background knowledge about the topic of the reading text and in understanding the main ideas of this text. In addition, giving students the chance to improve their word-meaning attack skill through the reading text added a lot to their vocabulary size and to their skills in comprehending the assigned reading passages. In general, using both explicit and implicit strategies together in teaching vocabulary and reading comprehension has proved to be more effective than using only one or depending on the traditional method which is mainly based on defining new words and showing their meanings prior to reading a new text or having students look words up in a dictionary, finding the nearest equivalents which are often used in order to help them learn these new words and memorize them in word lists.

IV. Conclusions and recommendations

Teachers should try hard to vary their vocabulary teaching techniques and strategies and should avoid traditional ones which mainly depend on memorization.

-Students should be given enough chance to develop their meaning- attack skills by utilizing the implicit vocabulary teaching strategy effectively.

-The utilization of the explicit vocabulary teaching strategy should also be given enough attention so as to provide students with background knowledge about the assigned texts and to facilitate students' reading comprehension.

-Students should be always encouraged to utilize the clues implied in the reading texts so as to develop their general language proficiency and to improve their reading comprehension skills in particular.

-Russian translation of new vocabulary items should always be avoided. There are various teaching techniques which should effectively be used. Russian translation only be used as the last solution.

References:

1. Neuman, S. B., & Dwyer, J. (2009). Missing in action: Vocabulary instruction in pre-K. The Reading Teacher, 62(5), 384-392.

2. Sedita, Joan. (2005), Effective Vocabulary Instruction. "Insights on Learning Disabilities" 2(1) 33-45.

3. Chall, J.s. & Jacobs, V. A. (2003). Poor children's fourth-grade slump. American Educator, American Federation of Teachers.

4. Cuningham, A. E. & Stanovich, K. E. (1998). What Reading Does for the Mind. American Educator, Spring/Summer, 8-17.

5. Stahl, S. A. (2003) Vocabulary and readability: How knowing word meanings affects comprehension. Topics in Language Disorders, 23(3), 241- 247

6. Ellis, N., C. (1994). Vocabulary acquisition: The implicit ins and outs of explicit cognitive mediation. Implicit and explicit learning of languages (pp. 211-282). London: Academic Press.

7. Haastrup, K. & Henriksen, B. (2000). Vocabulary acquisition: acquiring depth of knowledge through network building. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 10, 221-240.