An Investigation of the Possible Effects of Favored Contexts in Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition

It is widely agreed that much second language vocabulary learning occurs while the learner is attentively engaged in the process of reading and interpreting the texts encountered. It is also argued that to understand vocabulary learning linguists cannot limit the investigation of the process of vocabulary learning to word meaning (Gass, 1999). Since many questions remain unsettled in this domain, this study was conducted in the context of TEFL to investigate the effect of teaching vocabulary through its use in contexts in which learners have an interest versus contexts in which they are not that much interested. It, therefore, examines the impact(s) of contextual vocabulary learning and attempts to have a comparison of the effect(s) of the role of favored contexts as opposed to disfavored contexts. The experiment involved two groups of twenty-five male Iranian participants aged from 15 to 25 at the intermediate level in an Iranian English language institute. All things considered, a pretest-posttest control group design was determined to check the accuracy of the researchers’ hypothesis in a short-term treatment through the application of reading comprehension tests (RCT). As a result, the overall findings support the initial idea that second language vocabulary acquisition (SLVA) is better achieved through the use of favored-contexts.