The Effect of Teaching and Learning Vocabulary in Lexical Chunks on the Listening Comprehension of Adult Learners of Arabic

This study aimed to investigate how teaching and learning Arabic vocabulary items in multiword form (i.e., chunks and phrases), rather than in single form (i.e., one word at a time), affects learners’ ability to comprehend Arabic listening passages and to examine the relationship between students’ auditory knowledge of words, and that of phrases and listening comprehension. Data sources included three types of tests: the Arabic listening comprehension test, the single-word auditory knowledge test, and the multiword auditory knowledge test. The sample consists of 39 students (experimental group=20, control group=19). The study was separated into a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest portion (Phase 1) and a quantitative non-experimental portion (Phases 2 and 3). The first purpose was to assess the effect of learning Arabic vocabulary in multiword form (experimental group), rather than in single form (control group), on the listening comprehension, while the second two purposes were used to examine the relationship between auditory knowledge and listening comprehension and how much of the listening comprehension is explained by auditory knowledge. The results showed that post-intervention listening comprehension was significantly higher in the experimental group (F(1,36)=6.80, p=.013). The results also showed that the correlation was significant and high between single-word score and listening comprehension at both pre- (r=.79, p\u3c.001) and post-intervention (r=.80, p\u3c.001), as well as between the post-intervention multi-word score and listening comprehension score (r=.84, p\u3c.001). The regression analysis showed that the multi-word auditory knowledge scores positively predicted listening comprehension (β=.640, p=.002), but the single-word auditory knowledge score was not a significant predictor. The whole model was statistically significant (F(2,36)=46.74, R2=.72, p\u3c.001). This study has implications for the fields of second language acquisition, listening comprehension, language research, and teaching methods. More research on learning vocabulary in lexical chunks would further expand the current understanding of this approach and its effect on listening comprehension