Effect of Cognate-Based Instruction Strategy on Vocabulary Learning Among Iranian EFL Learners

Cognates are the words celebrating their similarities from phonetic, orthographic, and semantic points of view across two or more languages. The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of cognate-based instruction strategy on vocabulary learning among Iranian EFL learners. To achieve the goal of the study, 80 EFL learners (15-27 years old) took part in the study; all of them were learning English at language institutes of Lorestan and Isfahan provinces in Iran. Half of the participants who were native speakers of Laki language were assigned to experimental group and the remaining 40 who were from Isfahan and not familiar with Laki language were assigned to control group. Oxford Placement Test (OPT) was administered to make sure that the participants were homogeneous. The participants in both groups were taught target words (42 English-Laki cognate words), by the researcher, during six sessions. A pretest was administered for both groups before the treatment and a posttest was managed after the treatment for both groups. Three weeks after the treatment, a delayed posttest was administered for experimental group, only. One sample t test for pre and posttest, and paired sample t test for delayed posttest were run. Findings of the study showed that participants in the experimental group outperformed the participants in the control group, resulting in null hypothesis rejection. In addition, the results indicated similar performance of experimental group in both posttest and delayed posttest, confirming that new cognate words were not forgotten over a period of time.