The Impact of Teaching Vocabulary-Acquisition Strategies on Reading Comprehension of EFL Third Grade High School Students

This research was an attempt to study the effect of two strategies of guessing meaning fromthe context and the use of affixes on the reading comprehension of a group of EFL thirdgrade high school students. For this purpose, 90 intermediate students studying English inShahed high school in Farsan, Shahrekord, Iran were chosen to participate in this study. Theparticipants were randomly divided into three equal groups, each containing thirty students.The first experimental group received instruction based on guessing meaning from thecontext, while students learnt the affix instruction in the second experimental group. At theend of the treatment, a multiple-choice posttest of reading comprehension was administeredto compare vocabulary achievement among the groups. Analysis of the results of the posttestrevealed a positive effect for guessing meaning from the context method, resulting in therejection of the first null hypothesis. Comparison of the results of immediate posttest anddelayed posttest of the groups further helped to reject the second null hypothesis, since theresults showed that the participants who used guessing the meaning from the context methodcould store and retain vocabulary items in their long-term memory better than those who usedanother method.

کلیدواژه ها:

Third grade high school students ، Guessing the meaning from the context ، Recall ، Long-term memory ، Short-term memory