The effects of teaching vocabulary related to architecture through word roots strategy at higher education level

The vocabulary learning process is seen as difficult and time consuming part of language learning. One of the factors that makes it difficult for students to learn English for specific purpose (ESP) words is that the words used in ESP are specific to a particular discipline and rarely used in general English. There are different learning strategies used by ESP learners for memorizing and retention of words. Although dissecting words into their roots and suffixes is among these strategies, it has not received enough attention in ESP vocabulary teaching. There are also few studies focusing on the benefits of teaching vocabulary roots. These few studies underline the efficiency of vocabulary learning/teaching with roots. However, the impact of the word root strategy on the teaching of ESP words and its ability to predict the meaning of unknown words has not been emphasized. The aim of this study is to show the effect of the word roots training on predicting the meaning of unknown ESP words correctly and the retention of these words. The experimental approach was adopted throughout the study. Two groups of students studying in the same department of a state university participated in the present study. Each group was composed of 30 students. A pre-test was applied to both control and experimental groups at the beginning of the study to see the word knowledge the homogeneity of the groups. As it is hard to decide which words are ESP words, the words in all tests applied in this study were selected from a corpus of 505,649 words related to Architecture. After the pre-test, the words were taught to the treatment group through word root training while the control group learnt these words through dictionary usage. Ten weeks later, a post-test was performed to observe the effect of this method on vocabulary retention. A week later, a delayed post-test was also conducted to measure the students' competence of predicting the meaning of the ESP words they had never seen before. For triangulation, in addition to pre-test, post-test and delayed post-test, students were asked to keep a diary and they were also interviewed. The tests' scores were analyzed via SPSS 23 and thematic analysis was used for the analysis of the qualitative data. The results of the tests applied, the answers of the participants given in the interviews and the extracts from the diaries the participants kept all showed that word root strategy is an effective and welcomed tool for learning new English words. Key Words: Teaching with word roots, discipline-specific English words, vocabulary learning strategies