The effect of reading purpose on incidental vocabulary learning and retention among elementary Iranian learners of English

This study, situated in an EFL context, aimed at discovering the ways purposes behind reading activities  influence  vocabulary  knowledge  gain  and  retrieval.  Seventy  five  elementary  learners of  English  were  randomly  assigned  to  three  groups  of  ‘free  reading’,  ‘reading  comprehension’ and ‘reading to summarize’. A modified text was administered to all the three groups. The data in  both  immediate  and  delayed  post-test  revealed  that  both  vocabulary  learning  and  retention were  greatly  influenced  by  the  purposeful  reading  activity.  The  Scheffe  post-hoc  test  revealed that  the  mean  scores  of  the  ‘summarizing’  and  ‘reading  comprehension’  groups  were significantly  different  from  the  mean  score  of  the  ‘free  reading’  group.  But  the  results  did  not indicate  any  significant  differences  between  the  mean  scores  of  the  two  groups  of ‘summarizing’  and  ‘reading  comprehension’.  However  the  strength  of  association  for  the immediate  post-test  and  the  delayed  one  showed  that  a  large  part  of  the  variance  between  the three groups could be explained by the reading purpose.