this study investigates the effect of teacher’s repetition as an input enhancement technique in explicit teaching of vocabulary items on efl learners’ later retrieval. to this end, 66 persian speaking english learners, aged 18 - 29, homogenized through a standard proficiency test (opt), were chosen and put into two experimental and control groups, each 33 learners. general service list (gsl), a list of the most frequent english words designed by west (1953), was given to all the participants to tick their unknown items. among words unknown to all the participants, 80 words were chosen and taught to both groups during 10 sessions. in the experimental group, teaching was accompanied by repetitions to enhance the input, but in the other group no repetitions were used.