Sentence Translation and Vocabulary Retention in an EFL Reading Class

The present study investigated the effect of sentence translation as a production task on short-term and long-term retention of foreign vocabulary. 87 EFL university students at a beginning level, enrolled in reading class participated in the study. The study compared the performance of three groups on vocabulary recall: (1) Control group, (2) Translation group, and (3) Copy group. During the treatment sessions, translation group translated L1 sentences into English, while copy group simply copied given English sentences with each target word. Results of the immediate test were collected each week from week 2 to week 5 and analyzed by one-way ANOVA. Results revealed that regarding short-term vocabulary retention, participants in rote-copy condition outperformed those in translation group. Four weeks later a delayed test was administered to measure long-term vocabulary retention. In contrast, the results of two-way repeated measures ANOVA showed that long-term vocabulary retention of translation group was significantly greater than copy group. The findings suggest that although sentence translation is rather challenging to low-level learners, it may facilitate long-term retention of new vocabulary given the more elaborate and deeper processing the task entails.