The Study of Vocabulary Awareness Effect on Intermediate Language Learners ’ Depth of Vocabulary Knowledge in Genuine Persian Texts

Every single day, we use spoken and written words to communicate thoughts, ideas and emotions. Sometimes, we are successful in communication, and sometimes we are not quite successful. We can say what we mean by use of good vocabulary knowledge. Facing with a written text, a good vocabulary is a very important tool. By having a good knowledge of vocabulary, you will be able to choose the best appropriate word. The purpose of the present study was set out to investigate the effects of vocabulary awareness on depth of vocabulary knowledge. In order to measure the effects of vocabulary awareness instruction on students’ depth of vocabulary knowledge, a Word Associates Test (WAT) was administered to both groups in pretest and post test. After comparing the mean scores of pre test and post test results, it was revealed that vocabulary awareness instruction group outperformed the control group in reading comprehension performance, but not in depth of vocabulary knowledge, so vocabulary awareness instruction does not influence participants’ depth of vocabulary knowledge.


Introduction
Knowledge of L2 vocabulary is multi-faceted.It not only means direct translation of the L2 vocabulary but involves many other aspects of knowledge as well.Different definitions for have been offered by many researchers.Grendel (1993) defines word comprehension as "knowing the meaning of a word" (p.141).Vygotsky (1986) states that "a meaningless word is just a sound, no longer a part of human speech" (p. 6).Nation (2001) suggesting a word knowledge framework in a way that a person's knowledge of a word must be both productive and receptive, "in order to cover all aspects of what is involved in knowing a word" (Nation, 2001, p. 26).
According to Nation & Newton (1997) vocabulary is knowledge of words and word meanings.Actually vocabulary is more complex, vocabulary mastery is not only knowing the words and its meanings, but also knowing about how the words sound and how the words are used in the context.Miller & Gildea (1987) state that knowing a word by sound and sight and knowing its definition in dictionary are not the same as knowing its usage correctly and understanding it when it is heard or seen in various contexts.It is central to learning a foreign language at primary level and build up a useful vocabulary (Cameron, 2001).Since vocabulary is all about words, and good mastery of vocabulary helps someone understand language.It is supported by Wallace (1982) who says that vocabulary is one of the most important parts of languages, because when speaking a language, the speakers need several words to convey ideas.Therefore, people can understand what the speakers mean.When a learner intends to learn foreign language, he/she has to learn the vocabulary of the foreign language first.Bernhardt (2005) comments that the most nowadays essencial factor in language proficiency and school success is considered knowledge of words, and we can say its related to its close relation with text comprehension.It is not possible to understanding sentences or texts without knowledge of words.

Objective and Research Question
The purpose of the study was to investigate the connection between vocabulary awareness and reading comprehension in genuine Persian texts Based on the main purpose of the present study, the following question was made: RQ: Does vocabulary awareness have any significant effect on intermediate language learners' reading comprehension?
In order to answer to the above research question, the following research null hypothesis was proposed: H0: Vocabulary awareness does not have any significant effect on intermediate language learners' reading comprehension.

Vocabulary Learning Strategies
Learning strategies are the "process by which information is obtained, stored, retrieved, and use" (Rubin, 1987, p. 29).They are specific actions, behaviors, steps or techniques that students employ consciously to improve the progress in "internalizing, storing, retrieving, and using the L2" (Oxford, 1992, p. 175) O' Malley & Chamot (1990) divided learning strategies into three major types: metacognitive, cognitive and social/affective.Oxford (1990) added in two other types: compensation and memory while Schmitt (1997) included two more namely, determination and consolidation.In the following, these strategies are described in brief.

Metacognitive Strategies
They are strategies for monitoring the process of language learning and use, taking steps to efficiently regulate and plan the learning processes.

Cognitive Strategies
They are the strategies to manipulate information in a task so that the learners can either acquire or retain the information from the task.When learners meet unknown words, they use social strategies to ask people around them such as the classmates, friends, teachers or parents for the explanation of the words.Thus, they are strategies that relate to human relationship.Affective strategies relate to one's emotional control.They help suppress negative feelings when one meets an unknown word.

Memory Strategies
They involve relating the unknown words with previously learnt words and may need the learners to connect the new unknown words to personal experiences, and pictures and images.

Consolidation Strategies
They are different strategies to consolidate what is learned.By using the strategies, the learners try hard to remember the new words learned.They may do written or verbal repetitions, repeat the words over time, do rote learning, connect the new word with synonyms and antonyms, and take notes in the lessons.

Determination and Compensation Strategies
Determination strategies are used to discover meanings and obtain initial information of unknown words.They involve analyzing the part of speech and affixes of the unknown words, L1 knowledge, guessing from contexts, making use of pictures or images and using dictionaries.Compensation strategies, such as guessing the meaning of unknown words, are used when learners meet unknown words.Determination strategies work closely with incidental vocabulary learning.When learners read texts and meet unknown words, lexical inference skills are employed to decode the words.

Definition of Vocabulary
According to Nation & Newton (1997) vocabulary is knowledge of words and word meanings.Actually vocabulary is more complex, vocabulary mastery is not only knowing the words and its meanings, but also knowing about how the words sound and how the words are used in the context.Someone who has a lot of vocabulary of foreign language, she/he could learn language easily.Since vocabulary is all about words, and good mastery of vocabulary helps someone understand language.It is supported by Wallace (1982) who says that vocabulary is one of the most important parts of languages, because when speaking a language, the speakers need several words to convey ideas.Therefore, people can understand what the speakers mean.When a learner intends to learn foreign language, he/she has to learn the vocabulary of the foreign language first.Wallace (1982) mentions two main reasons about the importance of vocabulary which is as follows:

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Language exists in two forms, spoken and written, both of them need vocabulary to develop the existence itself.

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Vocabulary is needed for production in learning English as a foreign language rather than only needed for recognition it.Furthermore, Lehr & Osborn (2001) explain two kinds of vocabulary description as follows.
First, a word has two forms, oral and print.

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Oral vocabulary includes the words that are recognized and used in listening and speaking.
• Print vocabulary includes the words that are recognized and used in reading and writing.
Second, word knowledge is composed of two forms, receptive and productive.

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Receptive Vocabulary includes words that are recognized when we hear or see them.It is the ability to comprehend passive vocabulary which is used in reading and listening context.

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Productive vocabulary includes words that are recognized when we speak or write.It is an active ability which is used in speaking or writing.
Furthermore, knowing and understanding words mean knowing their "form" (how they sounds, how they spelt, grammatical change that could be made to them), their "meaning" (their conceptual content, and how they relate to other words and in particular types of language use (Cameron, 2001).

Vocabulary and Its Importance
Learning a language without vocabulary is impossible.In recent years, second or foreign language vocabulary learning has become a topic of much interest for researchers, teachers, curriculum designers and theorists.We can define vocabulary as the words of a language, containing single items, phrases or chunks of words by a particular meaning.Vocabulary includes single lexical items i.e., words with specific meaning and also addresses lexical phrases or chunks.Since without sufficient vocabulary, learners cannot understand others or express their own ideas in communication the importance of vocabulary is central to English language teaching (Allen, 1983;Brown, 1994).Wilkins (1972) wrote "while without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed" (p.112).Lewis (1993) wrote "lexis is the core or heart of language" (p.89).As learners develop their expression and fluency in English, it is vital for learners to have more productive vocabulary knowledge and to improve their own personal strategies for learning vocabulary.Learners often instinctively understand the importance of vocabulary for language learning.Schmitt (2010) stated "learners carry around dictionaries and not grammar books" (p.4), so teaching vocabulary helps learners to understand meaning and communicate with others in English.There are various ways for defining concept of a word, but three significant aspects that teachers need to focus on and be aware of them are form, meaning, and use.Rivers (1984) believes that vocabulary cannot be taught although it can be explained, presented, demonstrated along with other techniques and activities, it must be learned by individuals.Individuals differ in their knowledge of vocabulary.The vocabulary we understand and use varies in nature and quantity from one person to the other.This is also the exact case for native speakers.Acquiring his/her first language, one develops concepts by means of learning how our surroundings express these concepts.Later on, as our competence develops, we use the language to express new concepts to our fellows.Lessard-Clouston (1996, p. 27) wrote that "Vocabulary-words, phrases, idioms, etc. is at the heart of all language usage in the skill areas of listening, speaking, reading, and writing, as well as culture".McCarthy (1990) states that "How well the student learns grammar is not important, and no matter how successfully the sounds of L2 (second language learner) are mastered, communication cannot happen in any meaningful way in L2 without words to express a wider range of meanings."An essential part of language is vocabulary.A second language learner will find it difficult to do well in the four skills namely, speaking, listening, reading and writing, without adequate vocabulary knowledge.

Vocabulary Awareness
In recent decades, vocabulary researchers have indicated various but complementary frameworks, to have a definition on what it means to know a word in second language (L2).Most of them claim lexical knowledge is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon, but it involves different degrees of knowledge.Researchers say it should be consist of several levels and dimensions of knowledge and constructed as a continuum, or continua.Most of what is written on word knowledge relates to the well-known vocabulary knowledge framework of Richards (1976).He dandified seven aspects of word knowledge (e.g., associations, syntactic behavior, different meanings, semantic value, underlying form and derivations).Nation (1990) identified eight types of word knowledge (e.g., grammatical pattern, form, function, meaning, relation with other words), that were specified for both receptive and productive knowledge.Chapelle (1998) suggests that a special vocabulary definition should contain four dimensions: (a) knowledge of word characteristics, (b) vocabulary size, (c) lexicon organization, and (d) processes of lexical access.Henriksen (1999) stated three separate but related vocabulary dimensions: (a) a "partial-precise knowledge" dimension, (b) a "depth of knowledge" dimension, and (c) a "receptive-productive" dimension.Qian's (2002) newly framework, developed on the collective strength of earlier models of vocabulary knowledge claimed that vocabulary knowledge contains four intrinsically connected dimensions: (a) vocabulary size, (b) depth of vocabulary knowledge, (c) lexical organization, and (d) automaticity of receptive-productive knowledge.The significance of different factors in these dimensions varies based on specific goal of language use.In all reviewed frameworks, there is a clear consensus that vocabulary knowledge should at least contain two dimensions, which are vocabulary depth, or quality and breadth, or size of vocabulary knowledge.Vocabulary breadth is related to the number of words the meaning of which a learner has at least some superficial knowledge.Depth of vocabulary knowledge refers to learner's level knowledge of various aspects of a given word, or how well the learner knows this word.Nation (2001) defined eight different types of knowledge which are necessary to know a word, but later corrected it, adding a ninth aspect "word parts".His explanation of the nine aspects of vocabulary knowledge which are put forth as follows: • Knowledge of the spoken form of a word Further, Nation (2001) separated each of them into receptive and productive knowledge.It could be said that vocabulary knowledge is a systematic procedure that different types of knowledge are acquired until all aspects of knowledge are known for an item and not an all-or-nothing relationship.Acquiring comprehensive knowledge of a word requires substantial takings in all nine aspects of knowledge, and as a result, large number of words, mostly the less frequent ones, may only be partially learned.It also seems possible that some aspects of knowledge are acquired before others.Schmitt & McCarthy (1990) and Schmitt (1997Schmitt ( , 2000) ) claim that knowledge of meaning and form may be acquired before some of the other aspects such as register and collocation.
Rouhi & Mousapour Negari (2013) designed a research to explore the role of size and depth of vocabulary knowledge in reading comprehension performance of Iranian EFL learners.To this aim, 50 EFL students studying at Islamic Azad University of Kerman, Iran participated in the study.A two-tailed Pearson correlation and multiple regression analyses were run in order to analyze the scores obtained from three tests, VLA, WAT and RCT.The results revealed that a) size, depth of vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension are positively and significantly correlated to each other, b) both size and depth are of equal importance in Iranian EFL learners' success in reading comprehension performance and c) comparatively, size correlated more strongly to the success of Iranian EFL learners' in reading comprehension performance than depth of vocabulary knowledge.
In another study, Ma & Lin (2015) designed a research study to investigate the overall and relative contribution of four subcomponents of vocabulary knowledge to reading comprehension.The four vocabulary subcomponents were vocabulary size, word association knowledge, collocation knowledge, and morphological knowledge.The participants were 124 college students from a university in Taipei, Taiwan.Six instruments were employed: • A reading comprehension test The results can be summarized as follows.First, after the effects of motivation and self-efficacy have been controlled, the four vocabulary subcomponents altogether contributed significantly (20%) to reading comprehension performance.Moreover, depth of vocabulary knowledge (including word association knowledge, collocation knowledge, and morphological knowledge) provided an additional explained variance (6%) in reading comprehension performance over and above vocabulary size.Finally, among the three subcomponents of depth of vocabulary knowledge, collocation knowledge explained the most proportion of variance (5.6%) in contributing to performance on reading comprehension.Based on these findings, some implications and suggestions for future research were provided.
A similar study which was done by Azman Mokhtar in 2010, the VLT was administered among 360 Malaysian diploma students at University Technology MARA, Perlis.The researchers were concerned in whether the students knew an adequate number of words with high-frequency or not and not strongly concerned with students' total score on the test.Hence, the researchers recognized it essential to prepare a study which there is little consideration on vocabulary in most reading comprehension courses.
Farvardin & Koosha (2011) tried to investigate the connection between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension, and to find out which aspect of vocabulary knowledge, breadth or depth, have more effect on reading comprehension performance.So, three language tests were used, a reading comprehension test, Vocabulary Levels Test revised by Schmitt et al. (2001), and Read's (1998) Word Associates Test.The total participants of present study were 78 freshmen majoring in TEFL at Islamic Azad University of Najafabad, Iran.
The results of the two-tailed Pearson Correlations and multiple regression analyses revealed that 1) there were a positive correlation between test scores on vocabulary breadth, depth of vocabulary knowledge, and reading comprehension 2) stronger predictor was vocabulary breadth for reading comprehension and not vocabulary knowledge and 3) there was a close correlation between breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge.The obtained results further indicated that both breadth and depth of vocabulary are useful predictors of reading comprehension performance and even a combination of the both associates better with reading comprehension than either one alone.

Participants
The whole population of the present study was 120 female EFL learners who studied English as a foreign language at Iran Language Institute which was located in Zanjan, Iran.These language learners were selected from all female EFL learners of the institute.The study population had studied English for 2 to 4 years in the said language institute.The Quick Oxford Placement Test (QOPT) was used for homogenizing the learners.After administration of the placement test, 56 intermediate EFL learners were selected as the main members of the current research.

Design
The design of this study is quasi experimental.In this study the participant students are divided into two groups.
The experimental group receives the specially designed reading comprehension instruction including vocabulary awareness raising activities.However, the control group in this study received reading comprehension instruction based on traditional approach.The Quick Oxford Placement Test (QOPT) was used for homogenizing the learners.After administration of the placement test, 56 intermediate EFL learners were selected as the main members of the current research.The intervention occurred in the spring of 2016 in 14 sessions, twice a week (Saturday and Monday).Two classes, as control and experimental groups participated in the study and both groups had the same teacher.

Instruments
Two instruments were utilized to answer the research question of this study: The vocabulary awareness instruction were as follows • Some important words from the passage were bolded, italicized, and underlined.This was done to raise participants' awareness about vocabularies.

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One student was asked to summarize the passage orally with his/ her own words.

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The students were allowed to guess the meaning and also to ask about miscomprehensions.
• Some realias were used for teaching new vocabularies.
• Different pictures were used for teaching some words.
The treatment lasted for 14 days of instruction: two sessions every week, each session 20 minutes.In the control group, the learners did not use any specific awareness raising strategy.In fact the teacher followed all stages of reading instruction except vocabulary awareness raising step (underlined words, bolded words, etc.).As the third step, all participants take the post-test which was the same as pretest.It needs to be added that the test items of WAT had focused on the vocabularies which were used in reading comprehension passages during treatment.

Results
The participants' responses, both for pre-test and post-test, were measured, analyzed and the scores were entered into SPSS 18.0 data file.Descriptive analyses were then conducted to measure the mean, standard deviation and normality of distribution for the scores.This information was necessary for deciding what variables could be included with confidence in the primary analyses addressing the study's research questions.To start analyzing the results, the researcher launched Smirnov-Kolmogorov to check the homogeneity of the participants of both groups.Since the results were satisfactory, the researcher started to compare means of both groups' test results.
The data from reading comprehension and depth of vocabulary knowledge was used to measure the correlation between the two variables before and after their vocabulary awareness was enhanced.
The null hypothesis was concerned with the role of vocabulary awareness on intermediate students' depth of vocabulary knowledge.An independent samples t-test procedure was used to compare depth of vocabulary knowledge difference of experimental and control group before receiving treatment (vocabulary awareness rising).However, before comparing the results of the two groups on depth of vocabulary knowledge, there was a need to check if mean scores are different or not.Descriptive statistics for the depth of vocabulary knowledge related to pretest among participants of experimental and control group are indicated in Table 1.Therefore, based on the reports of data analysis above, the null hypothesis, predicting an insignificant role of vocabulary awareness in learners' depth of vocabulary knowledge, was retained.

Discussion
The research question revealed that vocabulary awareness does not influence depth of vocabulary knowledge in a significant way.This finding is in contrast with Nilforushan (2012) who conducted a study to the effect of teaching vocabularies to increase the awareness on the potency and evaluation dimension of deep vocabulary knowledge.This contradiction could be explained by the existing differences between the two studies.The main source of contradiction could have been the adopted approaches toward vocabulary acquisition.While in the present study the researcher worked on reading comprehension vocabularies, Nilforushan (2012) instructed vocabularies through concept mapping.
In another study Rouhi & MousapourNegari (2013) designed a research to explore the role of size and depth of vocabulary knowledge in reading comprehension performance of Iranian EFL learners.Their findings are in contrast with our findings in a way that a two-tailed Pearson correlation and multiple regression analyses were run in order to analyze the scores obtained from two tests, VLA, WAT.The results revealed that a size and depth of vocabulary knowledge positively and importantly are connected to each other, and this contradiction reason may be the gender of participants in these studies, in the present study the participants were female language learners, while Rouhi & Mousapour Negari (2013) used both male and female participants in their study.
The findings showed that although vocabulary awareness enhances reading comprehension, this improvement is not achieved through deepening vocabulary knowledge.Then, if learners are expected to have a deep knowledge of vocabularies, vocabulary awareness instruction is not suggested to be utilized in classroom context.In fact, the effectiveness of vocabulary awareness instruction in developing reading comprehension knowledge of the intermediate participants might have been due to its novelty and would diminish as time goes by.Moreover, the ineffectiveness of vocabulary awareness instruction in enhancing depth of vocabulary knowledge might have been related to insufficient exposure to vocabulary awareness instruction.
The present study indicated that various explanations regarding the obtained results and existing contradictions can be offered.Firstly, learners' proficiency could have been a decisive variable on the effectiveness of vocabulary awareness instruction.Then, it might be the case that for effectiveness of vocabulary awareness instruction EFL learners need to have threshold level of general English proficiency.As mentioned in chapter three the participants of present study were intermediate level students in their English proficiency.Then, the contradiction between this study and previous studies might be because of difference in the nature of the participants.Moreover, the role of context of the study should not be ignored.The contradictory findings of this study might be due to the fact that previous studies had used different instruments while in this study we used WAT and reading comprehension test in general.The length of treatment might be an important contextual factor too.
The focus on participants, context (general reading comprehension), proficiency, and age lies in the fact that, as mentioned in chapter four, these factors interact with the degree to which vocabulary awareness instruction influences depth of vocabulary knowledge.For instance, advanced participants might be better than intermediate and elementary participants in terms of their ability to use depth of vocabulary knowledge in more efficient reading comprehension (Thomas, 2002).
The results of the third research question suggested that there is no relationship between reading comprehension and depth of vocabulary knowledge, this point implies that language learners can enhance their comprehension even without very deep knowledge of vocabularies.
Whatever the case, the main goal of this study was to investigate the usefulness of vocabulary awareness instruction on intermediate learners' depth of vocabulary knowledge.As the results showed, vocabulary awareness instruction group (experimental group) outperformed the other group (control group) in reading comprehension performance, and not in depth of vocabulary knowledge.Since, the researcher did not assign any classroom time on teaching vocabulary awareness (in fact the time was allocated during material designing through the process of selecting and bolding the target vocabularies, it can be stated that vocabulary awareness instruction is not very time consuming and it can be achieved very easily through input enhancement techniques.Short-term results might not be equal to longer-term results.The effect of long term vocabulary awareness instructions on depth of vocabulary knowledge needs more attention and exploration. A. Rubin (Eds.),Learner strategies in language learning.New York: Prentice Hall.Schmitt, N., Jiang, X., & Grabe, W. (2011).The percentage of words known in a text and reading comprehension.

Appendix
• For questions 1 to 5, mark one letter A, B or C on your Answer Sheet.Questions 6-10 • In this section you must choose the word which best fits each space in the text below.
• For questions6 to 10, mark one letter A, B or C on your Answer Sheet.

Scotland
Scotland is the north part of the island of Great Britain.The Atlantic Ocean is on the west and the North Sea on the east.Some people (6 Questions 41-50 • In this section you must choose the word or phrase which best fits each space in the texts.
• For questions 41 to 50, mark one letter A, B, C or D on your Answer Sheet.

The tallest buildings-SKYSCRAPERS
Nowadays, skyscrapers can be found in most major cities of the world.A building which was many Knowledge of the written form of a word • Knowledge of the parts in a word which have meaning • Knowledge of the link between a particular form and a meaning • Knowledge of the concepts a word may possess • Knowledge of the vocabulary that is associated with a word • Knowledge of a word's grammatical functions • Knowledge of a word's collocations • Knowledge of a word's register and frequency.

Table 1 .
Descriptive statistics for pretest depth of vocabulary knowledge of control and experimental groups Since the mean scores of the two groups was not equal (experimental group= 76.21; control group= 82.14), the researcher carried out an independent samples t-test to see if this difference is statistically significant or not.Table2Provides detailed information about t-test results.

Table 2 .
Independent sample t-test for significance of pre-test depth of vocabulary knowledge difference two groups are different in their depth of vocabulary knowledge scores or not.If mean differences are statistically significant, it can be claimed that the difference has been the result of treatment.As the post test result indicated, the depth of vocabulary knowledge means were different after the treatment.Descriptive statistics for post test depth of vocabulary knowledge score difference of both groups are indicated in table 3.

Table 3 .
Descriptive statistics for post -test depth of vocabulary knowledge

Table 4 .
Independent sample t-test results for post-test reading comprehension ** : significant at 0.01.
• For questions 51 to 60, mark one letter A, B, C or D on your Answer Sheet.51