Elementary school EFL Learners’ Vocabulary Learning: The Effects of Post-Reading Activities by Derin Atay, Gokce Kurt

Article title : Elementary school EFL Learners’ Vocabulary Learning: The Effects of Post-Reading Activities
Writer : Derin Atay, Gokce Kurt
Journal/Newspaper : Project MUSE, Scholarly journals online
Date published : 2006 Number of words: 435
List no. : 158

This article is written by Derin Atay and Gokce Kurt. They both try to examine the effects of two types of post-reading activities: discrete written task on their own and a combination of written task along with interactive task on the vocabulary acquisition of young learner in an EFL setting.
The methods used in this research are observation and comparative method. The writers used 62 Grade 6 students in two classes in a public school in Turkey as the participants of this research, divide them into control and experimental group, and monitored them for about 6 weeks. They give both groups different types of post-reading activities then compare the result of them. After the post-test given, the result of the research show that there was a significant difference between the group in their gain scores in unselected vocabulary, and the gain score of the experimental group, which given a combination of written task along with interactive task, was significantly higher than that of the control group, which given discrete written task on their own.
The authors put themselves as an instructor and an observer in this research. They gave the instruction how and what should be taught to the students, and observed their progress during the research for about lasted 6 weeks until they found the result of the study.
I agree with the result of this research that the use of interactive task as post-reading activities proved to be an effective way of enhancing L2 vocabulary knowledge of young learner. For elementary school, vocabulary would affect them in carrying out the basic skills in English. Nagy, Herman and Anderson (1985) argue that teachers should promote extensive reading because it can lead to greater vocabulary growth than one program of explicit instruction alone ever could. But other studies show that the activities to gain vocabulary through reading can only be done by adult learner. So, it’s not enough to give them an individual reading task. There must be more explicit learning and teaching vocabulary treatment that can lead to better retention and more production.
In my experience, when I was reading English novels or textbooks, I often ignored unknown words in reading texts as long as it doesn’t interrupt my understanding. It makes me not sure of my knowledge of the word that actually I have seen before.