The Impact of Vocabulary Clustering on Facilitating Vocabulary Development Among Saudi EFL Learners
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1411.32Keywords:
vocabulary clustering, lexical sets, semantically-related words, vocabulary knowledgeAbstract
The current study sought to investigate how organizing new vocabulary through semantic, thematic, or unrelated sets could affect the learning process among Saudi EFL learners. The majority of EFL teachers and materials writers seem to introduce and cluster new words according to a particular type of semantic relationship (e.g., vegetables, body organs, car parts, or house parts) or a thematical relationship (e.g., a hotel room reservation, visiting a doctor's clinic, going to the post office, or at the train station). Participants in the current research were 149 EFL students from the Preparatory Year Program (PYP) at Al-Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud Islamic University (IMISIU), Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The design of this study was a pretest-treatment and posttest-delayed post-test. Two types of clustering of new vocabulary were explored: semantically related sets and semantically unrelated sets, which were constructed to identify how organizing new vocabulary could affect the learning process among Saudi EFL learners. The findings of the study showed that both semantically related (SR) and semantically unrelated (SU) sets seemed to help in learning new words. Nonetheless, those new words behaved differently one week after the treatment. Moreover, the SR group scored significantly better on both delayed tests than their counterparts. Furthermore, the study's outcomes failed to indicate any interfering effect of teaching and studying semantically relevant terms simultaneously in an actual classroom setting. This study concluded with recommendations for teaching and learning programs to develop students' conceptual understanding of organizing new vocabulary that affects the learning process among Saudi EFL learner’s context.
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