The Impact of a Custom-Made Vocabulary Application on the Vocabulary Recognition of Iranian EFL Learners

Subject Areas : Research in English Language Pedagogy

Faramarz Kazemainy ¹ , Hamed Barjesteh ² , Nassim Golaghaei ³ , Atefeh Nasrollahi Mouziraji ⁴

1 - Department of English Language and Literature, Islamic Azad University, Ayatollah Amoli Branch, Amol, Iran
2 - Department of English Language and Literature, Islamic Azad University, Ayatollah Amoli Branch, Amol, Iran
3 - ELT Department, Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages, Roudehen Branch, Islamic Azad University, Roudehen, Iran
4 - Department of English Language and Literature, Islamic Azad University, Ayatollah Amoli Branch, Amol, Iran

Received: 2021-01-29 Accepted : 2021-05-30 Published : 2021-07-03

Keywords: Needs analysis, Vocabulary Guru, Task Model, Mobile Assisted Language Learning, Agile Methodology,

Abstract :

Vocabulary Guru (VG) is a custom-made mobile application (app) developed based on the task model and agile methodology via qualitative needs analysis. This investigation intended to assess the impact of VG on EFL learners’vocabulary recognition. First, 84 academic vocabularies were selected, based on their frequencies defined by the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) (Davies, 2017) and the Academic Core Vocabulary Website (Davies & Gardner, 2019). From 141 university students, 60 intermediate female students were selected who were randomly assigned to an experimental group and a control group. The experimental group practiced the target vocabularies via VG, whereas the control group learned them via the conventional method. A vocabulary recognition test was developed and administered twice to both groups. Finally, two paired samples t-tests and two independent samples t-tests were utilized to estimate within and between-groups differences. The findings revealed that the experimental group outperformed the control group significantly.

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