The Effect of Using Word Clouds on EFL Students’ Long- Term Vocabulary Retention

Vocabulary is an important component in all four skills of language. Issue of vocabulary retention has great importance to EFL teachers in instructional contexts because they always observe students forget the words which are taught to them after a short period of time. The current study investigates whether the use of an interactive web-based tool referred to as ‘Wordsift’ can result in a significant improvement in long-term vocabulary retention of EFL students. 60 participants were selected to take part in the study.The participants’ age ranged from 17 to 24. They were taught 100 words in six contextualized texts. The main experiment consisted of twelve sessions, which were followed by an additional meeting designed to check the treatment effect on the long-term vocabulary retention. The results of T-test and ANOVA analyses indicated that word cloud (Wordsift) does have positive significant effect on EFL learners’ long-term vocabulary retention.