The Effect of Listening Based Activities on EFL Learners’ Vocabulary Learning

The current study investigates the effects of two forms of output activities on EFL learners’ recognition and recall of second language vocabulary. For this purpose, two homogeneous groups, each consisting of 20 female EFL intermediate learners studying at a language institute in Semnan, Iran, were randomly selected. A 25-item vocabulary test was developed and used to determine the unfamiliar words which served as target words in the pretest and posttest. The treatment of the study included of three times listening practice to an audio track of a story book titled Wuthering Heights (West Bronte, 2008) in two sessions. The participants of each group were instructed to employ one of the following two output activities after listening to the audio track: (1) summarizing the audio track and inserting target vocabulary in the summary; (2) generating several comprehension questions out of the audio track and answering them by incorporating the target words.