Learning word meanings from teachers' repeated story read-aloud in EFL primary classrooms

Lu-Chun Lin*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

11 Scopus citations

Abstract

This study used a quasi-experimental design to determine the effects of teachers' story read-aloud on EFL elementary school students' word learning outcomes. It specifically examined whether the word learning was enhanced by teachers' repeated story read-aloud and word-meaning explanations and further determined whether the learning outcomes were related to children's English proficiency. Two native English-speaking teachers read a story to their fourth-grade classes four times. The results showed that increasing frequency of story read-aloud yielded greater word-learning gains across time. The EFL children, on average, learned approximately half of the target words by the third read-aloud. While both high- and low-proficiency groups showed significant vocabulary gains with the frequency of teachers' read-aloud, the high-proficiency children consistently outperformed their low-proficiency peers, especially on the L1 meaning-matching vocabulary test. The overall findings were quite encouraging and showed empirical evidence that teachers' repeated story read-aloud can be an effective way to facilitate elementary school children's word learning in a context where English is a foreign language.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)68-81
Number of pages14
JournalEnglish Language Teaching
Volume7
Issue number7
DOIs
StatePublished - 13 Jun 2014

Keywords

  • EFL
  • Elementary school
  • English proficiency
  • Repetition
  • Story read-aloud
  • Vocabulary learning

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