A Reappraisal Perspective on Written Tasks Types and Vocabulary Acquisition and Retention of EFL Learners

2 Abstract: The current study investigated the effectiveness of the type of written exercises on L2 vocabulary retention. To this end 53 Iranian EFL university students practiced ten previously unencountered lexical items in three types of written exercises: multiple choice exercise (MC), filling-in-the blank exercise (FW) and sentence writing exercise (SW). The participants were given a mini-dictionary designed to help them both for meaning and usage of the target words while doing the exercises. An unannounced posttest was administered and the data were analyzed by running a Kruskal-Wallis Test. The findings revealed that the mean of MC exercise was significantly different from two other exercises, but no significant differences were found between FW and SW exercise. The findings confirm Folse that the depth of word processing is not the salient feature of vocabulary retention, but the amount of investment in word processing is more important (1).

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