The Effect of Teaching Vocabulary through Semantic Mapping on EFL Learners’ Awareness of the Affective Dimensions of Deep Vocabulary Knowledge

This study focused on the effect of teaching vocabulary through semantic mapping on the awareness of two affective dimensions, evaluation and potency dimensions of deep vocabulary knowledge as well as the general vocabulary knowledge of EFL students. Sixty intermediate EFL female adult learners participated in this study; they were chosen among 90 students through Prelemenary English test and a general vocabulary knowledge test. They were thus randomly divided into two group, experimental and control, each consisting of 30 students. As for the treatment, modifiers describing peoples’ characteristics were taught in the text and through semantic mapping, whereas these words were taught by usual vocabulary instruction in control group. At the end, students took a vocabulary achievement test and a test of awareness of evaluation and potency dimensions of deep vocabulary knowledge. A t-test was run to analyze the data from the vocabulary achievement test. Results showed that teaching collocations has great influence on the students` general vocabulary knowledge. To see if the independent variable had significant effects on awareness of evaluation and potency dimensions of deep vocabulary knowledge, a MANOVA was run revealing that teaching vocabularies through semantic mapping significantly improved learners` awareness of the two dimensions.