VOCABULARY SIZE OF SAUDI EFL LEARNERS

Investigation of the vocabulary size of Saudi EFL Learners

Introduction

English is taught in Saudi schools as a foreign language, mostly for instructional purposes. All the Saudi schools use the same syllabus and the same textbooks assigned and distributed freely by the Ministry of Education. The Ministry of Education In Saudi Arabia is responsible for revising textbooks, evaluating them and approving changes in them. Changes made in the textbooks usually rely on research conducted by the ministry itself. The textbook is the main teaching material on which the students, as well as the teachers, rely. It usually contains dialogues and variety of passages, which often include expository, narrative, and descriptive subjects (McDough, 1995). The vocabulary size refers to the unique words that a person uses in his or her statements. It can be gauged by writing a text and passing it through the vocabulary test tool to know how many total words you used and how many of them are unique. That is, you know, in numerical terms, what vocabulary you use. In this paper, we will discuss the vocabulary tests and development with respect to Saudi EFL learners.

Significance of the study

Studies are evident of the fact that their lie a huge gap between Saudi college-level students' proficiency level with that of higher proficiency expected from EFL university students. The Educational Testing Services (ETS) reports of the last seven years reveal that Saudi students who took the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) scored the lowest compared with their peers from Middle Eastern countries (Educational Testing Services, 2007). There are several limitations that are evident in this aspect. There is an unclear picture about the most popular uses of reading strategies by Saudi EFL learners in Saudi public universities. At present, only a small number of studies have been conducted on the effectiveness of reading strategies on Saudi EFL reading comprehension.

Scope of the Study

This paper investigates the effectiveness of teaching four reading strategies on EFL Saudi female students' reading comprehension and on their reported use of these strategies. The strategies taught were two “global” strategies: finding main ideas and prediction. Global strategies are those related to the general approach and comprehension of the reading passage (Ehrman, 2003). The other two strategies were problem-solving strategies: word analysis and guessing the meanings of words. The study aims at investigating the impact of teaching global and problem-solving strategies on preparatory- level students' reading comprehension. It also measures how preparatory level students' perception of use of strategies develops after teaching these strategies to the students. There were three groups of beginning students representing two treatment groups and one control group. Each treatment group received training in different strategies. The number of students in the global strategy group was 24, and in the problem solving strategy group it was 22 students. Students in the control group numbered 21 (McDough, 1995). Measurements consisted of reading comprehension tests and a questionnaire about reading strategies conducted over pre- and post-training ...