چكيده
Abstract
The fundamental purpose of the study was to investigate whether the levels
of contextualization have any effect on the productive vocabulary
knowledge of EFL learners. In addition, the present study tried to find
whether there is any meaningful difference between the receptive and
productive vocabulary performance of the learners. Having administered an
English proficiency test (PET) to 82 students, the researcher found 60 of
them qualified for this project. After that, the participants were randomly
selected into three groups of 20. Each group received the instruction of 218
English content words through de-contextualizing, semi-contextualizing and
fully contextualizing techniques respectively. All these words were
randomly and proportionally selected from the participants’ text books
revealed to be unknown through a vocabulary knowledge scale (VKS)
before the treatment. The treatment lasted for sixteen sessions for each group
on the whole. After the treatment, a vocabulary c-test and also an MC
vocabulary test was designed to measure participants’ vocabulary
knowledge. The former assumed to measure the productive vocabulary
knowledge was validated with the Nation’s c-test and showed the correlation
of 0.778. Similarly, the latter assumed to measure the receptive vocabulary
knowledge was validated with the Michigan Test and showed the correlation
of 0.792. After administration, the results of the one way ANOVA proved
that only full contextualization has a notable effect on the productive
vocabulary performance of the participants while the effect of decontextualization
and semi-contextualization were not statistically
significant. Therefore, the first null hypothesis was safely rejected. In
addition, with the calculation and analysis of the receptive scores of the
participants, Repeated Measures of analysis showed that there is a
significant difference between the receptive and productive performance of
the learners. The implication is that we were safely entitled to reject the
second null hypothesis, too. In addition, the results of this analysis also
indicated that there is no interaction effect between the independent variable
i.e. levels of contextualization, and the dependent variable i.e. receptive and
productive vocabulary performance. Needless to say, the findings of this test
demonstrated that all groups have performed better on the receptive test than
the productive one. It was finally concluded if we are interested in
improving learners’ productive vocabulary performance, it’s better to defend
teaching words through full contextualization.
