A comparative analysis of teaching vocabulary in context and by definition

Abstract

The study aims to prove a hypothesis related to the different ways of teaching vocabulary and their effectiveness. This study has been applied at two classes of the Department of Foreign Languages of TOBB University of Economics and Technology. These classes have been instructed on words in two different techniques; one of which is teaching vocabulary in discourse and context whereas the other is teaching words by providing only the word definitions. A vocabulary test composed of four parts has been constructed and applied before and after the instruction. The test has been applied in two steps as a pretest to show the selected words are unknown by the students and as a posttest to evaluate the effectiveness of both techniques. According to Levene's test in Independent Samples Test for the post-test, there is not a statistically significant difference in post-test scores of the two groups. As a result, presenting the target vocabulary items in context and by definitions does not make a remarkable difference in terms of overall performance.