Effects of Retrieval Vocabulary Instruction on Academic Reading Comprehension

This study aimed to explore the effects of retrieval vocabulary instruction on academic reading comprehension of 40 participants at the School of Foreign Languages at Istanbul Şehir University. According to Barcroft (2015) retrieval vocabulary is defined as the learners‟ ability to recall the words when they need to produce or use them accordingly. The independent variable is retrieval vocabulary instruction and the dependent variable is academic reading comprehension. A pre-test was administered in the first week of module in order to see the academic reading comprehension level of the participants. A treatment of retrieval vocabulary instruction was given for seven weeks. Later a post-test was administered in week eight so as to observe whether retrieval vocabulary instruction has any positive effect on academic reading comprehension or not. SPSS was used in order to analyze the data, and graphically detailed analysis of the reading comprehension tests are shown at the end. A Pair Sample statistics was used. The findings of the current study indicated that according to significance levels and the means of the both of the groups, it can be said that there is a significant change between two test scores taken at different times from the same groups of participants. Thus, it can be concluded that the treatment of the retrieval vocabulary instruction was beneficial for the participants since it increased their reading comprehension scores.