Doctoral thesis
The concern of this study was to design Instructed Vocabulary Lessons (IVL) that
would ensure adequate coverage of vocabulary in the mainstream curriculum.
Therefore, the study was guided by four specific objectives. These included to provide
a situational analysis of both sociocultural context and vocabulary building practices in
the current English Language Syllabus, to design the IVL for promoting vocabulary
knowledge within the current English Language Syllabus, to assess the usefulness of
the designed IVL in terms of supporting vocabulary building, and to assess the
perceptions of teachers towards the designed IVL.
The study was built on both interpretivism and positivism paradigms and thus, action
research and quasi experimental designs were adopted. Consequently, both qualitative
and quantitative approaches were used to facilitate the collection and analysis of the
data. The study involved a sample of 193 learners and 4 teachers who were sampled
from four primary schools. Methodological triangulation was adopted and thus, five
data collection methods were used. These were observation, questionnaire, analysis of
documents (documentary review), focus group discussion and vocabulary tests.
The study revealed that despite its role in language learning, vocabulary learning is
scrappily presented in the primary school English language syllabus, text books and
general classroom practices. Consequently, this study developed IVL and assessed
them both qualitatively and quantitatively. The results showed that learners‟
performances in vocabulary tests were high during intervention (whenever IVL was
applied) but their scores decreased in the absence of IVL. Therefore, these results
confirmed that learners require well planned explicit vocabulary instruction to
understand, remember, and use the targeted words. However, a call is made to future
researchers to make some follow up on the conclusions made by this study.