A comparative study into the effect of using short story in EFL courses on vocabulary instruction

Given that short story serves as an effective tool in the EFL classroom, this study aims at investigating the impact of the use of short stories on vocabulary instruction through making a comparison between the two basic vocabulary learning strategies, dictionary use and contextual guessing. For this purpose, a quasi-experimental design was used and the words used in the experiment were selected out of the short story ?The Cask of Amontillado? by Edgar Allan Poe. It was the 3rd year class of the ELT department at Çanakkale 18 Mart University to read this short story during the experiment. The class was divided into two groups; contextual guessing group; the other dictionary group. Accordingly, for the purpose of the study, the participants took a test called ?Vocabulary Levels Test?, first devised by Paul Nation (2000) to measure their vocabulary knowledge, so we could discover if learners with more vocabulary items in their memory do better in contextual guessing and/or dictionary use. Further, the study also attempted to reveal what kind of factors actually hinder or facilitate learning a word in context.To this end, the results of the experiment provided answers to the three research questions below; 1) Which vocabulary learning technique is more effective in acquiring a vocabulary item? Guessing or dictionary use? 2) What factors make it difficult for the students to learn a word through guessing and dictionary use? 3) Does acquiring a large vocabulary capacity have any effect on the success in guessing from context and learning vocabulary through dictionary use?