The Impact of Storytelling and Cooperative Learning on Iranian EFL Learners Vocabulary Achievement

Abstract

The researcher investigated the effect of using short stories and cooperative learning together in one class and compared its effect with the existing traditional methods and cooperative program as well as contextualized short-story-based program. To do so, 75 Iranian female EFL learners participated in the study after a homogeneity test. They were divided into three groups i.e., storytelling, cooperative, and mixed. The learners in the cooperative group followed the above procedures of cooperative learning for reading short stories and the short story group was engaged in a question and answering activity was guided by the teacher, as mentioned earlier. Moreover, the mixed group covered the short stories extensively out of the class as described for the short story group and did the cooperative group work activity in class. After the treatment lasted 12 sessions, the learners took the test again. The study's findings reveal that using story-telling can be a good strategy to bypass the difficulty of vocabulary instruction insomuch it gives leaners chances of using new words communicatively to produce target forms in meaningful real-world contexts.