CONTEXTUALIZATION VERSUS INFERENCING STRATEGIES TO DEVELOP VOCABULARY LEARNING AMONG INTERMEDIATE EFL STUDENTS

This study was an attempt to investigate the effect of teaching two cognitive strategies i.e. Contextualization versus Inferencing on the Iranian intermediate English as a foreign language (EFL) students vocabulary development. In this study, the researchers have employed two Contextualization and Inferencing strategies taken from Brown (2000) to teach forty intermediate words to 77 participants. The participants were intermediate students of Golestan Language Institute who were divided into two experimental and one control groups. One of the groups benefited from Contextualization, the other one received Inferencing strategies, and no specific treatment was applied for control group. Based on the definition of cognitive strategies and the two selected strategies, the researchers tried to manipulate the teaching materials in a way that the words were placed in a meaningful sequence for Contextualization, and provided some information and clues that helped participants to guess the meaning of the new words for Inferencing. The results of this study gained through t-test and Oneway ANOVA analysis, indicated that the Contextualization strategy was more helpful in development of the intended vocabulary, since the related groupʹs results outweighed the findings of the other two groups, in other words the difference between the mean scores of Contextualization and Inferencing strategies was statistically significant. The findings of this study suggest that the teachers should take advantage of the cognitive strategies more effectively in their classes while teaching vocabulary.