the effects of bilingual vs. glossed reading text teaching on chunk learning by efl intermediate learners

Chunk learning has been construed as a cognitive load reduction strategy that helps the long strings of information stick in the short-term memory by changing them into small manageable units, thus facilitating the l2 lexical acquisition. the present quasi-experimental study investigated the effectiveness of bilingual vs glossed reading texts instruction on chunk learning by iranian efl intermediate learners. the researcher selected 60 english language students out of 80 students from three institutes through administering an opt test. then, the homogenized students were randomly assigned into the control (n=20) and two experimental groups (n=20). next, the piloted chunk test was administered as the pre-test to both groups of the experimental and the control in order to examine their chunk knowledge. in the glossed group, the learners read texts containing unknown chunks supported with glossed words in the margin to understand the meanings of the words. in the bilingual group, they were provided with chunk-level word meaning in farsi. the chunks were collocations, fixed expressions, formulaic utterances, sentence starters, verb patterns, idioms and catchphrases which were provided along with their english and farsi equivalents. after completing the treatment sessions, a posttest was administered to determine the effect of chunk instruction. the results of t-test and one-way anova indicated that although students in both groups were similar in chunk knowledge at the outset, the experimental groups significantly outperformed the control group in the post-test. however, there was no significant difference between the bilingual text and glossed text groups in terms of chunk learning. as for implications, the paper suggests a number of useful tips to the prospective l2 learners, teachers and syllabus designers in an iranian efl context.