Shahla Tavanapour - English Department, Isfahan (Khorasgan) Branch, Islamic Azad University, Iran
Hossein Heidari Tabrizi - Associate Professor English Department, Isfahan (Khorasgan) Branch, Islamic Azad University, Iran

This study investigated the effects of receptive and productive tasks on learning vocabularyamong Iranian Intermediate EFL learners. Participants of this study were 60 Iranian PersianNative speaker students who had enrolled in a General English course from Islamic AzadUniversity, Ahwaz Branch. The age of participants ranged between 25 and 35 years.Subsequently, the participants were randomly divided into two groups; namely, receptive andproductive. Then, at the beginning of the treatment period, a teacher-made vocabulary test wasadministered to two groups as the pre-test. The receptive group was given instruction byreceptive tasks while the productive group was taught by productive tasks. At the end of theperiod, a post-test, a parallel form of the pre-test, was administered to both target groups. Theanalysis of data was accomplished through the application of paired and independent sample ttests.The results revealed that the performance of the students using productive tasks was betterthan that of receptive groups and there were significant differences in the performance ofproductive groups in the pre and post-tests. Based on the result of this study, both receptive andproductive tasks are effective methods for teaching vocabularies in EFL class, but receptivetasks, though was less significant than the productive task in this study, should be also utilized asthe second priority in teaching vocabularies in EFL class. Notably, the findings may haveimportant implications for EFL teachers, material developers, and non-native English learners.

Productive task, Receptive task, Task-based instruction, Vocabulary