چكيده
While many studies in foreign language learning in Iran have concentrated on developing effective vocabulary instruction methodologies, little research has focused on the ways instructors can encourage Iranian EFL learners towards the reading comprehension process. Integrating varied teaching styles into vocabulary learning activities may be one way for foreign language educators to help promote vocabulary learning and reading comprehension. This experimental study investigated whether 60 impulsive and reflective learners learn vocabulary by semantic clustering differently. Three groups of intermediate level EFL students took part in the study. Placement Test which included vocabulary and reading items was used in order to get homogeneous groups of participants. They were also given a reading comprehension pretest, the purpose of which was to measure the learners’ initial reading comprehension ability. The treatment procedure took thirty to forty five minute for 10 sessions. The 40 students in impulsive and reflective groups were taught vocabulary to semantic clustering. In teaching the control group, the teacher gave the vocabulary list. Finally, at the end of the course all the groups sat for the posttest. Then the statistical analysis was run through one-way ANOVA. The findings revealed that significant gain occurred in all groups regarding learners’ reading comprehension ability, but the impulsive group outperformed the others. The findings indicated that the EFL teachers can benefit greatly from semantic clustering in order to enhance reading comprehension of their students.
Key Words: Semantic Clustering , Reading Comprehension , Impulsive Learners , Reflective Learners
