Vocabulary Learning

Vocabulary teaching and learning is a very challenging and demanding process while learning any foreign language. University students try to find out which vocabulary learning method is more beneficial or even the best one. However, not surprisingly, their first approach is to try to memorize every word that they do not know. According to the studies, beginners prefer learning words separately, that is, using a list of words to memorize, whereas advanced students, although there are some exceptions, try to learn words in context (Ellis, 1994, p. 553). Likewise, vocabulary teaching is generally restricted to presenting new items as they appear in any activity without preparing the learners through activation of prior knowledge or helping them

They consider the teacher’s explanation for the meaning or definition, pronunciation, spelling and grammatical functions, boring. They are often passive in a vocabulary section of the class, just listening to their teacher. Their young faces do not hide the frustration in EFL classes. Most of them complain about the heavy burden of words. In reading and listening sections, they are awed by the many unknown and unfamiliar words and they cannot understand the underlying message. In other words, their competence in the target language is being held because of their limited vocabulary. With a limited vocabulary they cannot rely on the strategy of guessing the meaning from context. EFL learners in Iran often complain about forgetting new words soon after learning them and look for effective ways to increase opportunities for retaining new words in long-term memory. Because vocabulary acquisition is an important component of successfully developing communication and literacy skills, so in this research I am going to study online source as an effective approach in retaining new vocabularies in long-term memory of Iranian EFL learners. Although different studies confirmed the positive effects of CALL and the internet on vocabulary, there is a lack of research to examine the influence of online source for lexical items especially in academic settings. (Lim & Morris, 2009, p.