Vocabulary In English Language Learning

Vocabulary seems to be a major barrier to many English language learners. Most of learners are deal with the problem lack of word storage and because of that they cannot communicate well in a foreign language. When students begin learning another language, vocabulary should be at the heart of instruction. Vocabulary instruction forms a very important aspect of any foreign language teaching and learning. This is because the knowledge of vocabulary determines and decides the level of a foreign language learner. If foreign language learners lack a mature vocabulary, their other language skills suffer significantly. The knowledge of vocabulary plays a very crucial in the major language skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing. Mastery

The teaching and learning of vocabulary and other aspects of language need special attention from both teachers and learners. According to Rahimi (2008) some of vocabulary learning problems are misconception, rote learning, dictionary use, lack of sufficient input, lack of output and memory. Solving these problems may be of great help to both students and teachers. This research tends to solve some of these problems through reading short stories. Also, the teachers in Iran, all of times have the problems for teaching vocabulary, especially for beginner to intermediate students. For solving this problem, they use some strategies and methods. For example they use direct strategies like repetition, retain the vocabularies or use indirect strategies like using of the films, cartoons, or role playing. One important way to develop vocabulary knowledge is through extensive reading. Students by reading extensively will be exposed to different new scope of vocabulary which is necessary in reading comprehension (Pazhakh, 2010). It seems that literature, especially short story has important role in teaching and learning English, especially in the form of implicit learning. According to Cunningham & Stanovich (1998) Reading volume is very important in terms of long-term vocabulary development. In later work, Cunningham (2005) further recommended structured read- aloud, discussion

The primary concern for the researcher in this study was to investigate whether reading stories have any effect on improving vocabulary knowledge of Iranian upper-intermediate EFL learners. To achieve this goal vocabulary development is receiving attention in this research.

Another problem is that students usually complain that they forget newly learnt words soon after learning them. Many students learning a new language look at vocabulary instruction as simply looking up the word in a translation dictionary (Huyen&Nga, 2003). This process seems to frustrate the learners because they simply cannot remember the list of words and blame it on themselves (Gnoinska, 1998). Huyen and Nga claimed that researches have shown that the “look and remember” way of vocabulary learning seems to be not very effective for learners of the English language (Huyen&Nga, 2003, p.