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Arabic-Speaking Students of EFL, Vocabulary, and the Art of Structured Review

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English Language Teaching Research in the Middle East and North Africa

Abstract

Arabic-speaking students face unique difficulties in learning vocabulary, in part because of limited crossover between English and Arabic. This chapter addressed the effectiveness of structured review using images to help students learn vocabulary meaning and usage. The study indicated that students’ productive vocabulary grew when structured review was incorporated into the curriculum, particularly if the structured review was contextualized, and that the use of images was suited to all major lexical categories—but that correct usage of the vocabulary was not a corollary. While structured review using images appeared to be effective in helping students learn meaning across lexical categories, the study indicated that it needed to be fused with additional structured review of usage to help Arabic-speaking students build deep vocabularies.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Note that 2.9 + 1.7 = 4.6, which is slightly lower than their overall average of 4.8. The discrepancy is due to the fact that quiz 2, as noted above, was not included in the analysis of lexical categories.

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Lotze, N. (2019). Arabic-Speaking Students of EFL, Vocabulary, and the Art of Structured Review. In: Hidri, S. (eds) English Language Teaching Research in the Middle East and North Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98533-6_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98533-6_16

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-98532-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-98533-6

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