The effects of presenting different types of vocabulary clusters on very young learners' foreign language vocabulary learning

The main aim of this study was to find out which type of vocabulary cluster veryyoung learners benefit from the most while learning foreign language vocabulary. Threetypes of clusters were investigated in this study; semantic, thematic and unrelated. Thestudy also aimed at shedding light on the effects of these three vocabulary clusters on theimmediate and delayed recall of foreign language vocabulary. Quantitative research methods(immediate and delayed recall tests) were used to explore the aims.In accordance with the aims, 51 very young EFL learners participated in the study. Apre-test was administered to determine the target words in the three clusters so that all targetwords were new to all participants. The participants received immediate recall testsimmediately after the instruction of L2 words in each cluster. Delayed recall tests were alsoadministered for each cluster after three days of reviews of the words in the clusters. It tookthree weeks to complete the data collection.The analysis of the quantitative data results of the study revealed that the presenting L2words in different type of clusters have a significant effect on very young EFL learners? L2vocabulary retention. The results showed that the subjects remembered significantly moreL2 words when the words were grouped in unrelated clusters. In addition, the subjectsrecalled significantly more L2 words in the thematic clusters than semantic clusters. It isclear from the results that grouping L2 words in semantic clusters caused significantly lowergains of L2 vocabulary. Moreover, when immediate and delayed recall test results werecompared it was revealed that in both long and short term, the effects of clusters types werepresent and the same for very young EFL learners. Lastly, it was also proved that veryyoung EFL learners benefitted significantly from reviews regardless of the cluster types.