Effects of Task Types on Learning Specific Parts of Speech in English

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to examine the effects of task types on short-term and long-term retention of vocabulary from different parts of speech. The tasks were L1 summary writing (SW), L1 sentence translation (ST), gap-fill (GF), and comprehension questions (CQ). The subjects were undergraduate students from different departments at a local university. Throughout the experiment period, the subjects took Vocabulary Size Test (VST) and performed their respective tasks. Upon completing their task, they were required to take a posttest immediately after their tasks, and two weeks later, the same posttest was administered to examine the long-term effect of the tasks on retention of vocabulary from different parts of speech. The result showed that SW group performed significantly better than CQ group for retaining the target vocabulary from all the parts of speech on the immediate posttest. However, the result of the delayed posttest showed that SW group outperformed all the other groups in retaining noun for a longer period of time.