The effect of Creating a WhatsApp group to improve Academic Vocabulary Skills in English among undergraduates of Aesthetic Studies at Eastern University, Sri Lanka. University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka.

Abstract

There is a considerable demand for English Language Teaching (ELT) in Sri Lanka. Accordingly, the research is based on teaching Academic vocabulary skills in English to the undergraduates as the students had low academic vocabulary competency. Some previous researches generally explain that the use of social media is very effective techniques in the teaching-learning environment. However, this research specifically focused on WhatsApp group to fill the gap of the previous researches which did not explicitly focus on WhatApp media. Therefore, the aim of the research was to develop Academic vocabulary skills in English among the undergraduates by Whatsapping English Academic words in a WhatsApp group to motivate and improve the English vocabulary skills among the graduates. The research took an experimental research design. Random sampling method was used to select sixty second year undergraduates. The undergraduates belonged to two English Groups; each containing 30, but the students were engaged with the same ELT curriculum of the institution. Each group was pre tested on Academic vocabulary and the means of the pretest (36.3) revealed that the students of the two groups were in the same vocabulary competency. Furthermore, the students were put into two groups where the excremental group was exposed to WhatsApp Group for teaching Academic vocabularies in which every student was instructed to text two new vocabularies and meanings every day on given title in the WhatsApp group, as well as the researcher monitored the students writings text and corrected. The writing activity was stopped at 6.00pm and the students were instructed to make sentences in their note books using the vocabulary. Moreover, the students were requested to display their sentences with the new learned vocabularies in the following classes and the researcher and other students could correct the uses of the academic vocabularies in the sentences. On the other hand, the control group was involved in the ordinary Academic vocabulary sessions on the same vocabulary tiles given by the researcher. Moreover, the two group students were given a post-test where the marks obtained were compared. It was found that the students who were exposed to ordinary vocabulary session did not show considerable difference in the means (41.4) including some showing a little decrease in marks, whereas the students who were involved in WhatsApping words in the WhatsApp group showed a remarkable increase in obtaining marks as the means of the test was 57.4. Therefore, it was noted that the effect of creating WhatsApp group in teaching Academic vocabulary in English to the undergraduate students enhances their ability in improving Academic vocabulary skills in English.