The effect of extensive and intensive reading on vocabulary knowledge of Iranian English language students

Yones Izadi¹

1) Master of English Language Teaching, Islamic Azad University, Bandar Abbas Branch, Iran.

Publication : The second national conference on literary comparison (comparative literature) of Persian, Arabic and English(colitconf.ir)
Abstract :
The current study aimed to investigate the effect of Extensive Reading and Intensive Reading on reading comprehension and vocabulary knowledge (both size and depth) of Iranians EFL students of High school in Bandar Abbas. To this end, one hundred and twenty participants studying English as a foreign language at high school in Bandar Abbas were chosen based on their Oxford Quick Placement Test (2004) scores. They were divided into two levels, intermediate and advanced level. Then; the students in both levels were randomly divided into two groups, one receiving Intensive Reading treatment, while the other group received Extensive Reading. Participants with IR treatment were taught the English book and those with ER were given short stories based on their levels of proficiency. To achieve the goal, two types of vocabulary test Schmidt s Vocabulary Levels Test (2001) and Read s Word Association Test (1998) were administered. Each was run twice, once before the treatment (IR/ER) as a pretest and one after the treatment as a posttest to check the effects of the two treatments on vocabulary knowledge (size and depth) of the participants. Two- way ANOVA was used to analyze the data. The result of the study showed that both IR and ER had an impact on learners vocabulary knowledge significantly and that the students vocabulary knowledge in terms of size and depth increased. Moreover, the students at the intermediate level took more advantages from IR than ER, but in the advanced group the students benefit more from ER than IR. Finally, the study demonstrated that reading both intensively and extensively can lead to vocabulary development in a way that the number of vocabulary which each learner knows in terms of each word s synonym, antonym and collocation will be improved through reading.
Keywords : Extensive Reading Intensive Reading Reading comprehension and Vocabulary knowledge.