Impact of the explicit teaching program of vocabulary in the reading comprehension of 4th grade students

Abstract

The objective of this study was to determine the impact of the explicit vocabulary teaching program on the reading comprehension of students of 4th grade students froma subsidized private school, in the commune of Constitución. For this, a sample of 27 students was selected, with whom an experimental group and a control group were formed. An initial and final evaluation was applied to both groups. The instruments used were the TEVI - R, image vocabulary test, DOK vocabulary depth of knowledge test and a non standarized assesment of reading comprehension. Between both instances of evaluation, two lexical teaching methodologies were applied, the experimental group received the intervention based on the explicit vocabulary teaching program and the control group received the traditional vocabulary teaching. The design of the study was quasi-experimental and of comparative scope. The analysis of the data was carried out with the statistical program Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, version 18 (SPSS). Student's t-distribution test was applied to analyze the relationship between explicit vocabulary teaching and vocabulary and reading comprehension. We also carried out the multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA: Multivariate Analysis of Variance), to make comparisons between and intragroups that were evaluated with a pretest and a posttest. The results indicated that when comparing both methodologies, the explicitvocabulary teaching program significantly increased the lexicon development in the students, a finding that did not occur with the application of traditional teaching. On the other hand, in reading comprehension, the statistical data of the experimental and control group showed that the application of explicit teaching and traditional teaching did not have a significant impact in this area. Key words: explicit teaching program, vocabulary and reading comprension.