A Comparison Of The Impact Of Intentional And Incidental Learning On Vocabulary And Understanding Comprehension Text

Nowadays, with the dominance of communicative language teaching, the position of vocabulary and lexis in the field of language became significantly crucial in order to help learners develop communicative competence. To be able to negotiate with the target group of people, it is essential that the pool of vocabulary should be large enough to convey the meaning. In that case, the way how vocabulary is learned is brought into the debate. This study is intended to examine the impact of incidental and intentional vocabulary learning of Turkish learners of English on the vocabulary and comprehension tests. So as to carry out the objective of the comparison of intentional and incidental vocabulary learning, 40 freshmen studying at the Department of English Language Teaching participated in the study.  Freshmen were divided into two groups as the intentional learning group and incidental learning group. The participants were presented with a reading text in which they were exposed to some specific words. The intentional learning group was notified earlier that they would be given a vocabulary test about targeted words and a reading comprehension test. However, the incidental learning group had no idea about the vocabulary test and comprehension check, the results indicate that there is no significant difference between intentional group and incidental group in terms of vocabulary learning.