The Role of EFL Teachers’ Productive Vocabulary Size in Explaining Public School Students’ Vocabulary Knowledge
Author:
Abdullah Ibrahim Alfairouz
English language lecturer at Technical College of Environmental Sciences in Buraidah, and postgraduate student in the department of Educational Technology, Qassim University, Saudi Arabia
doi.org/10.52132/Ajrsp.e.2026.84.1
This study aimed to measure the productive vocabulary size of English language teachers in public schools in Saudi Arabia and to examine its role in explaining students’ low vocabulary knowledge in light of previous research findings. The study was motivated by the noticeable gap between the educational goals for English vocabulary and the actual level achieved by students by the end of sec-ondary school. Given learners’ limited exposure to English outside the class-room, there is a need to investigate the sources of linguistic input available with-in the classroom. The study adopted a quantitative descriptive approach and in-volved a sample of 42 male and female English language teachers working in public schools in Qassim region. The X-LexP test (Al-Falah, 2010) was used to measure the participants’ productive vocabulary size within the 5,000 most fre-quent words in English. The results showed that the teachers’ mean productive vocabulary size was 4,058 words, indicating that most participants possessed a relatively high productive vocabulary knowledge. A comparison with the find-ings of previous studies also revealed a clear gap between teachers’ vocabulary size and students’ vocabulary knowledge at the level of the most common words in English. This finding suggests that students’ low vocabulary knowledge may not be primarily attributable to teachers’ productive vocabulary size, but may in-stead be related to other classroom factors, such as how teachers use their pro-ductive vocabulary in classroom interaction and the actual amount of English exposure provided during the lesson. The study recommends greater attention to the pedagogical use of teachers’ vocabulary knowledge in classroom practices.
Keywords:
Vocabulary acquisition, vocabulary size, vocabulary knowledge, teacher talk, linguistic input
Academic Journal of Research and Scientific Publishing
