Teaching for the Long Term : Evaluating Vocabulary Retention through Intentional and Incidental Strategies in EFL Teaching and Learning

This thesis focuses on intentional and incidental vocabulary teaching and learning in the EFL classroom, with a focus on learners' long-term retention. Considering that long-term retention is a desired learning outcome, this topic is relevant for EFL teachers, since it can help teachers decide which strategy and method are best for vocabulary teaching and learning. Although teachers use different teaching strategies for vocabulary, it is not evident which of the two types of vocabulary teaching strategies are most supportive of students' vocabulary retention. Therefore, it is important to investigate the effectiveness of intentional and incidental strategies and methods, how they are used and when they are best for the students. To explore the selected topic, specific research questions are formulated as follows: i) Which methods are reportedly most effective for students' long-term retention within intentional vocabulary teaching? ii) Which methods are reportedly most effective for students' long-term retention within incidental vocabulary teaching? iii) Which strategy of intentional or incidental is the most effective for long term retention when compared? A review of literature about the strategies and their different methods, as well as long-term retention was used as the research method. Within the intentional teaching strategy, receptive tasks and frequent exposure to words are highlighted as important, while reading in its various forms is highlighted within the incidental teaching strategy. The findings also suggest that using a mix of both the intentional vocabulary teaching strategy and the incidental strategy is more effective for long-term retention. This thesis suggests that students can learn vocabulary through both intentional and incidental teaching methods, which implies that EFL teachers can and should use both in their teaching. Further research is needed to investigate benefits of specific methods within both strategies. Studies on methods withi