The Effect of Storytelling on Iranian EFL Learners’ Vocabulary Retention

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a study on utilizing two storytelling techniques, summarizing and strip story arrangement, in an EFL context. It focused on exploring which type of storytelling technique was more effective and thus could help EFL learners master the new words better. In was carried out in a private language school in Tehran, Iran. The participants were 105 learners who were selected from 160 elementary learners based on their performance on Oxford Placement Test as the test of homogenization. Three groups were formed, two experimental and one control group with 35 subjects in each. The learners in the summarizing group used the new words to summarize the stories in their written and spoken tasks and the learners in the other experimental group, strip story arrangement group, were asked to arrange some split sentences in their personal drafts. After thirty treatment sessions, the learners were given the posttest. The three groups’ performances on the posttest were compared by one way ANOVA. The results showed that the learners in summarizing group performed better than strip story arrangement group and both groups outperformed the control group.