The Comparative Effects of the Word Association and the Lexical Inferencing Strategies on EFL Intermediate Learners’ Phrasal Verbs Retention

The present study is an attempt to investigate the comparative effects of word association and lexical inferencing strategies on intermediate EFL learners’ phrasal verbs learning and retention. For this purpose, 90 female learners attending the Jahad Daneshgahi Center in Qom took a piloted sample KET test, 60 of whom were selected as homogenous learners. They were randomly divided into two experimental groups-one learning phrasal verbs through word association strategy and the other with the lexical inferencing strategy. They were given a pre-test on phrasal verbs to ensure that the participants had no prior knowledge of the target phrasal verbs. Then all participants in both groups were taught using the same material and received the same amount of instruction. The only difference was for teaching of phrasal verbs. One experimental group was taught mainly through the word association strategy while the other experimental group learned by the lexical inferencing strategy. After conducting the treatment, a post-test was administered to both groups. In order to measure the students ability on the retention of the phrasal verbs taught through word association and lexical inferencing strategies, in addition to the post-test, a delayed post-test was conducted after a two-week interval. The analysis of the test scores using t-test revealed that both strategies had a significant effect on learning and retention of the phrasal verbs. It was also concluded that there was no significant difference between the performances of both groups on learning and retention of the phrasal verbs.