PERTANIKA JOURNAL OF TROPICAL AGRICULTURAL SCIENCE

This study compared the effectiveness of incidental vocabulary acquisition and using direct vocabulary instruction to improve tertiary students’ academic vocabulary. Research has shown that Malaysian tertiary students lack exposure to academic vocabulary prior to their tertiary education and that they have an insufficient vocabulary size for tertiary education. Hence, this study explored the feasibility of providing direct vocabulary instruction with gamification through an intervention programme which the researcher named the Accelerated Vocabulary Acquisition (AVA) programme as a method to improve tertiary students’ academic vocabulary. Marzano’s three-phase framework for vocabulary instruction was adapted and gamification was incorporated through the use of the gaming platform Kahoot!. This study used a quantitative approach and adopted the non-randomized control group, pretest-posttest design. The participants were 180 tertiary students studying for their diploma in various fields. The academic section of the Vocabulary Levels Test (VLT) by Schmitt et al. was used to measure the students’ academic vocabulary. The results showed that the AVA programme is a feasible framework to improve tertiary students’ academic vocabulary as tertiary students who underwent the AVA programme outperformed the students in the control group who learnt academic vocabulary incidentally.