The Effect of Body Language Strategy on Iraqi EFL Primary School Pupils' Vocabulary Achievement
صالح مهدي المعموري, غسق باسم عبد الواحد, منى محمد عباس
كلية التربية الاساسية-جامعة بابل · العراق
Vocabulary teaching is an important and indispensable part of any language learning process. Most pupils have difficulties in both understanding and retention of English vocabulary due to a number of factors such as the types of methods that teachers use in teaching vocabulary and also the strategies and techniques that they disregard in teaching vocabulary. Body language strategy clarifies the meaning of words and expressions. However, this strategy is suggested to deal with the vocabulary learning of Iraqi EFL primary pupils in order to comprehend vocabularies and simplify the difficulty of English vocabulary learning. The study aims at finding out the impact of body language strategy on pupils' achievement in English vocabulary comprehension. For this purpose, it is hypothesized that there is no statistically significant difference between the mean score of the control group who are taught vocabulary by the recommended way in "Teacher's Guide" and that of the experimental group who are taught by body language strategy. The population of the present study is the fifth grade primary pupils in Al-Manama Primary School for Girls in Babylon city during the academic year (2017-2018). From this population, a sample of two groups is selected, one to be the experimental group and the other to perform as the control group; each group consists of 38 pupils. The researcher conducts a pre-test for the two groups, and then she manages a post-test for the two groups to measure the difference in their achievement in vocabulary comprehension. The researcher herself teaches the two groups to avoid personal differences. The instructional material is limited to units 5, 6, 7, and 8 from the textbook "English for Iraq" where the whole instructional material focused on vocabulary. The methods used to collect data are both qualitative and quantitative by means of the t-test formula for two independent samples to test the significance of the difference between the mean scores of the two groups and data in percentage of teachers' questionnaire; a random sample of 60 male and female teachers answered the questionnaire. The researcher also administers an interview to a number of supervisors in the Directorate of Preparation and Training in Babylon to gain more information about the role of body language strategy in teaching vocabulary comprehension and in the teaching process as a whole. After analyzing the obtained data, it is found that there is a statistically significant difference in favor of the experimental group. Therefore, it is concluded that the body language strategy has an impact on teaching vocabulary comprehension and the retention of vocabularies. Accordingly, a number of recommendations and suggestions for further research are put forward.