The Effect of L and L2 Word Glossary on Learning of Technical Vocabulary in Reading Comprehension Texts

The Effect of L and L2 Word Glossary on Learning of Technical Vocabulary in Reading Comprehension Texts

Mansouri, Saeedeh

Recent studies suggest that word marginal glossaries are very useful in reading text when readers have no knowledge about some words and help them comprehend the text without wasting time for looking up the word meaning in dictionaries or making mistakes because of incorrect guessing the word meaning according context. The study aimed to compare the effect of L1 & L2 word glossary on learning and retention of technical vocabularies of Civil Engineering students. The research question is: 'Is there any relation between retention and learning of technical vocabulary and using of glossaries?' If so, what is the difference between using of L1 and L2 word glossary and which of these two sorts has more effect on retention and learning of technical vocabulary? and the considered hypothesis is 'The effect of L1 and L2 word glossary is similar on retention and learning of technical vocabulary‘. The study was done by two tests (test 1 & test 2) with five passages of reading comprehension. In test 1, the definition of words in word glossary of technical vocabularies is in English language (L2) and in test 2, the definition of the vocabularies is in Persian language (L1). These two tests were administered one after another with 15 minutes break between them and 45 minutes was considered to answer the questions for each test. The same students participated in two tests. They were 40 Civil Engineering students of Engineering Technical University (Azad University), Chaloos branch. All of them were male and they were selected after administering a placement test among 60 Civil Engineering students of the university. The placement test was administered one week before the main tests. Comparison the scores of two tests and analyzing them showed that the students answer test 2 (with Persian word glossary) better than test 1 (with English word glossary). Although there were students that answer test 1 better than test 2 and some of them act the same in two tests, most of them answer test 2 (with Persian word glossary) better than test 1 (with English word glossary) and totally result disapprove the hypothesis of the study and it can be said L1 word glossary is more effective than L2 word glossary on learning and retention of vocabularies and also technical word glossary.

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

2011-05

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