A Comparative Study of Effect of Bottom-up and Top-down Instructional Approaches on EFL Learners Vocabulary Retention

Although there have been some studies on the effect of bottom-up and top-down processing in the learning of a second or foreign language, very little attention has been paid to bottom-up and top-down instructional approaches to language teaching. This quasi-experimental study examined the effect of bottom-up and top-down instructional approaches on English as a foreign language (EFL) vocabulary retention. A total of 44 high school students from two intact classes participated in the study. Each class was assigned to an experimental condition, bottom-up (n = 21) and top-down (n = 23). The participants were exposed to 20 hours of explicit vocabulary instruction during 10 weeks (2 sessions per week). Two tests, vocabulary size test (VST) and controlled productive knowledge tests (CPKT), were administered to measure the participants’ achievement before and after the treatment. The results of two-way repeated ANOVAs and independent samples t-tests revealed that bottom-up group outperformed top-down group on both VST and CPKT. The implications arising from the findings and suggestions for future research were also explained.