The Effect of Teaching Vocabulary through Microblogs on EFL Students’ Reading Comprehension

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The Effect of Teaching Vocabulary through Microblogs on EFL Students’ Reading Comprehension
Inroduction
Reading is an essential skill in learning a foreign language. By reading, a leaner gets to know the other language’s structure and culture in a better way and improves his writing and speaking. The learners’ reading comprehension has to be taken into the foreign language teachers’ account. A great attention has to be given to reading comprehension and teachers have to find the best ways to improve this skill in their students. One of the ways to improve reading comprehension is by vocabulary teaching and learning. Vocabulary has an effective role in improving one’s reading comprehension. There is an important relationship between these two regarding second language learning which should be considered when teaching. In this literature review, I address this relationship’s role in improving students’ reading comprehension and the effectiveness of integrating microblogs into the teaching of vocabulary on the student’s reading comprehension.
This study aims to answer the following questions:
1- Does teaching vocabulary by the use of microblogs have any effect on EFL students’ reading comprehension?
2- What are the students’ attitudes towards using microblogs in teaching vocabulary?
Vocabulary Knowledge and Reading Comprehension
Vocabulary plays an important role in learning a language. One of the reasons that makes vocabulary to have a great importance in EFL is the improvement vocabulary makes in students’ reading comprehension. Moreover, embedding vocabulary in class activities will be affective (Samir, 2007). Reading helps in building new vocabulary and the improvement of vocabulary and background knowledge contributes to the improvement of students’ reading comprehension. On the contrary to Samir’s study, Chou suggested that explicit vocabulary instruction and extensive reading will help in promote learners’ reading comprehension (Chou, 2011).
One study suggested that vocabulary size can be an effective factor in reading comprehension (Baleghizadeh, 2010). More than 1000 words have a great effect on how one comprehends a reading passage. Vocabulary size should be considered by teachers when teaching L2 students since the size of vocabulary have an impact on their reading comprehension.
Microblogs and Education
Microblogs is a technical tool that has educational purposes and which can be used during and after class time. Many studies and articles showed that the integration of microblogs into teaching is effective and improves students’ performance (e.g., Badge, Johnson, Moseley, & Cann, 2011, Crosseck & Holotesco, 2008, Ebner, Lienhardt, Rohs, & Meyer, 2009, R. Junco & E. Loken, 2010).
Other studies have been done concerning using microblogs in language teaching. One study found that using microblogs in language teaching is suitable, encouraging for students, and improves their communicative and cultural competence (Borau, Ullrich, Feng, & Shen, 2009). An article showed that using twitter in EFL education affects the students’ analytical and collaborative skills in a good way (Mork, 2009). Another study showed that using microblogs enhances the students’ participation and improves their practice in basic language skills (Perifanou, 2009). One more article found that microblogging makes the students active and discuss the course even after the entire course is over (Castro, 2009).
Microblogs, Vocabulary Learning, and Reading Comprehension
There are no studies available on the effects of learning vocabulary through microbolgs on EFL students’ reading comprehension. But similar studies have been done using the SMS technology. Since both, microblogs and SMS messaging, use short texts, these studies will be valuable to some extent.
In a study by Alemi and Lari (2012), three questions were addressed for guiding the study. First, does the vocabulary learnt via SMS have an effect on EFL learners’ reading comprehension? Second, do the vocabulary items learnt via SMS and the ones learnt by using a dictionary affect EFL learners’ reading comprehension differently? Third, what is the attitude of EFL learners towards SMS vocabulary learning? The first and third questions will be supportive for the current study since they discussed the same research questions. In their study, there were 45 non-English major students who aged between 18-21. The study used pre- and post-tests which were composed of tow texts, each contains eight multiple-choice items. Both groups were at the same level of reading proficiency. It also used 7 sub-lists of Academic Word List (AWL) and a questionnaire, to see the students’ attitudes towards learning vocabulary by the use of SMS, which was adopted from (Chen & Li, 2010). The control group was taught vocabulary in a traditional way, where the experimental group received 320 head words from the last 7 sub-lists from the AWL by the use of SMS. The study found that the experimental group scored better in the post-test compared to the pre-test (t= -10.43; p= .000). Almost 90% of the students showed positive attitudes towards using SMS vocabulary learning. These results support the current study in that short texts have positive effects on the learners’ vocabulary knowledge which in its turn has a positive effect on increasing the learners’ reading comprehension.
One more study relevant to the topic of this paper is a study by Motallebzadeh and Ganjali (2011) and was addressing the same question addressed in (Alemi & Lari, 2012). The study aimed to answer the question: does short message service (SMS) have any effect on vocabulary retention and reading comprehension ability of Iranian lower-intermediate EFL learners? The study was done only on female participants. There were 40 lower-intermediate EFL students aged between 19-25 divided into two groups, control and experimental group. Both groups were given a pre and post-test to see their level of reading proficiency. There was no significant difference in the levels of both groups, where the control group’s result is (M = 22.72, SD = 1.72) and the experimental’s (M = 1.91, SD = 1.54) . The control group was taught in the class and was given 3-4 vocabulary items provided in a piece of paper. The experimental group received SMS messages with 3-4 new words supported by example sentences three times a week. The results revealed that the experimental group scored higher grades in the post-test than the control group. Yet, the participants were only female students, the results of this study are reliable since they used the same amount of words for both groups. And the higher scores which were achieved by the experimental group in the pre-test showed that vocabulary learning via SMS messaging can enhance students’ reading comprehension.
Method
Design
The study uses a test-retest design which involves two reading comprehension tests. Each text of the reading test consists of 10 multiple-choice items, containing vocabulary test from the 60 words chosen from Academic Word List (AWL). These pre- and post-tests will be given to the participants before and after the experiment. The participants will be divided into the experimental group and the control group. The participants of the experimental group will receive tweets from the teacher containing the words to be taught. The control group will use a paper dictionary. There will be a comparison between the two groups in both the pre- and post-test scores. The comparison of the post-test score will reveal if the experimental group is affected by the use of twitter in teaching vocabulary.
Participants
The participants are 20 Saudi female students from the twelfth grade in Al-tarbya Al-namoutheagea high school. They are aged between 17-19. They take an English course five times a week and each class lasts for 50 minutes. The participants are randomly assigned to one of the two groups, to the control or the experimental group. Before the experiment begins, both groups are going to have a pre-test before to ensure that there is no significant difference in their reading proficiency.
Materials
The study uses a reading comprehension test which will be used as a pre- and a post-test. There are two texts taken from previous TOEFL tests. Each text contains 10 multiple-choice items. The study also uses AWL. The study uses 60 words to be taught to both groups and which consist of 20 head words, 20 most common words, and 20 more words which are chosen in a random way. Since the participants are getting ready to join the academic world, the study makes use of the AWL which contains academic words that they might face in any academic text (Coxhead, 2000 as cited in Alemi & Lari, 2012). One more instrument is a questionnaire which will be used to consider the participants’ attitude towards using twitter in learning vocabulary. It consists of 12 items asking about their background in using the social media and their experience in learning vocabulary via twitter. The items are based on a 5-point LiKert’s scale ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree. The questionnaire and the tests are adopted from Alemi and Lari’s study (Alemi & Lari, 2012).
Procedure
The first test session involves the pre-test to evaluate the participants’ reading proficiency. The test consists of 10 multiple-choice items. The reading comprehension test includes a vocabulary test form the AWL in order to measure the participants’ vocabulary knowledge. After giving the pre-test, a video on how to sign up in twitter and how to use it will be shown to students as well as distributing handouts on how to use twitter. During the experiment which will last for three weeks, the experimental group will be taught 60 words through twitter, where the control group will be asked to learn the same words using a paper dictionary. Following the teacher in twitter, the experimental group will read the tweets posted by the teacher. Every day, the teacher will post 4 words along with their meaning and a sentence. Following each other, the participants have to post tweets with sentences written by them using the posted words. On the other hand, the participants of the control group will be asked to write sentences with the same words and bring them the day after to the teacher. After the last post in twitter, both groups will be given the post reading comprehension test to measure their performance after the experiment is over. Finally, the experimental group will be asked to fill a questionnaire to reflect their attitudes towards using twitter in teaching vocabulary.