The Comparison between Contextual Guessing Strategies vs. Memorizing a List of Isolated Words in Vocabulary Learning Regarding Long Term Memory

Guessing the meaning of unknown vocabularies within a text is a way of learning new words which is named textual vocabulary acquisition. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of a textual guessing strategy on vocabulary learning at the intermediate level. Textual guessing strategy is to guess the meaning of vocabularies with the help of surrounding words or sentences in the co-text without any translation. This paper reports the findings of two quantitative studies conducted on English language learners with the Intermediate 2 level of proficiency in Kavosh foreign language institute, Mashhad, Iran. Twenty male and female attendants were selected and assigned to ’context’ and ‘non-context’ groups. The context group received an instruction to infer the meaning of new words while the non-context participants were treated as learning new vocabularies individually (autonomously). The result of the independent sample t-test at the post-test stage revealed that the probability value of t-test with an equality of variances assumption is lower than 0.05 (0.04700). So this result represented that there is a meaningful difference between the experimental group and the control group considering their amount of learning. The results indicated that textual guessing strategy had more effect on their long term memory. It was also revealed that the words learned through context are used more frequently than those learned in isolation in the speaking repertoire of the participants.