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چکیده
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The present study set out to investigate whether use of think-aloud procedure, as a data elicitation method, would yield any different results from those obtained through other instruments including interview and structured questionnaire in vocabulary strategy research. The study also aimed at identifying the strategies most and least frequently adopted by Iranian EFL learners for vocabulary acquisition. To this end, twenty two undergraduate EFL students were randomly selected. The Vocabulary Levels Test developed by Nation (2001) was used as a think-aloud task and the students were audio recorded individually. A semi-structured interview was also conducted after the think-aloud procedure. To analyze the data, the results of both think-aloud procedure and semi-structured interview were grouped in three codes using Sack's (1984) "motivated looking" approach and were then quantitized and frequency analyzed. The most frequently adopted strategies were found to be "repetition", "guessing" and " dictionary use" and the least frequently adopted strategies were reported to be "semantic maps", "consultation with others" and "using word lists". Chi square analyses were run to compare the results of the think-aloud procedure and those of the semi-structured interviews, the results of which indicated that there was no significant difference between the results obtained from the think-aloud procedure and those of the semi-structured interview as used in the present study and the results of structured questionnaire as adopted by Soodmand Afshar, Ketabi and Tavakoli (2012). The results of the study are discussed in detail and the implications are presented.
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