Effective Components in Teaching Methods for Facilitating EFL Students' Oral Vocabulary Development

Abstract: This study investigates language teaching methods and their effectiveness for high school EFL learners’ oral vocabulary development. Undoubtedly, a large and effective productive vocabulary is crucial for reaching the communicative goals for the subject of English as well as for future academic and professional life. Yet, EFL students’ productive vocabulary has shown to be considerably less than their receptive vocabulary. To investigate the effectiveness of teaching methods, an electronic search in educational databases was done. By examining numerous different studies, it seems that the choice of teaching activity does not matter significantly. However, what seems to be important is that the learning activities contain life-like elements in which students are required to both seek or receive vocabulary input, and also use the new words in meaningful outputs. Vocabulary input concerns students being provided with new vocabulary from the teacher, peers or a written text. Meaningful output, on the other hand, concerns the need to use new vocabulary for a communicative purpose in, for example, interactions related to learners’ interests. These findings are relevant for teachers of English as a foreign language, particularly in Sweden, as it provides insights into how to facilitate students’ development of oral vocabulary.