The role of extensive reading on vocabulary development

The main purpose of this study is, to reveal whether extensive reading has any role on vocabulary development of elementary level ESL (English as a Second Language) students. To this respect, a small-scale classroom research was carried out at a private university in the fall term of 2010-2011 academic year. 100 elementary level students were chosen and they were divided into experimental and control groups. With experimental group the materials for extensive reading were selected. Those materials were four graded readers. Control group was not exposed to any extensive reading during the fall term whereas students of the experimental group were asked to read those graded until the end of the fall term. However, both groups were responsible from the syllabus which was designed by school administration and it involved studying three units of a main course book until the end of the fall term. Then both groups took a pretest at the beginning of the term to display that they were at elementary level and a posttest at the end of the term to present whether any improvements were observed in their vocabulary or not. Finally the results were analyzed and compared to find out whether any difference occurred between two groups in terms of vocabulary development.