The Impact of Vocabulary Clustering on Facilitating Vocabulary Development Among Saudi EFL Learners

The current study sought to investigate how organizing new vocabulary through semantic, ‎thematic, or unrelated sets could affect the learning process among Saudi EFL learners. The ‎majority of EFL teachers and materials writers seem to introduce and cluster new words according to a ‎particular type of semantic relationship (e.g., vegetables, body organs, car parts, or house parts) or a thematical relationship (e.g., a hotel room reservation, visiting a doctor's clinic, going to the post office, or at the train station). ‎Participants in the current research were 149 EFL students from the Preparatory Year Program (PYP) at Al-Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud Islamic University (IMISIU), Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The design of this study was a pretest-treatment and posttest-delayed post-test. Two ‎types of clustering of new vocabulary were explored: semantically related sets and semantically ‎unrelated sets, which were constructed to identify how organizing new vocabulary could affect ‎the learning process among Saudi EFL learners. The findings of the study showed that both semantically ‎related (SR) and semantically unrelated (SU) sets ‎ seemed to help in learning new words. Nonetheless, ‎those new words behaved differently one week after the treatment. Moreover, the SR group scored significantly better on both delayed tests than ‎their ‎counterparts. Furthermore, the study's outcomes failed to indicate any interfering effect of ‎teaching and studying semantically relevant terms simultaneously in an actual classroom setting.‎ This study concluded with recommendations for teaching and learning programs to ‎develop ‎students' conceptual understanding of organizing new vocabulary that affects the learning ‎process among Saudi EFL learner’s context.‎