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The meaning-focused input (MFI), as suggested by Nation and Newton (2009), is one of the four strands that are required for a well balanced language course. According to Nation (2009), learning vocabulary through reading is one of the activities that promote this strand. Some results of the present studies provided some evidence for the MFI strand. The findings suggested that, the degree of effectiveness of intensive reading activities, in which learners infer the meaning of new words from context, in facilitating L2 vocabulary learning may depend on different factors such as reading strategies, knowledge sources, contextual clues and number of encounters of target words. While contextual clues significantly contributed to knowledge of …show more content…

In addition, Nation and Newton (2009) pointed out that knowledge gained through deliberate learning needs to be consolidated by opportunities to learn through MFI. For this reason, the time in the LFL strand should be shared between vocabulary learning through intensive reading as well as through explicit teaching methods such as using word cards (Nation & Newton, 2009). This assertion may be supported by the findings of Nassaji (2003) and Webb (2007). The results of the former seemed to question the effectiveness of contextual inferencing in learning new words and thus provided more support to explicit instruction of L2 vocabulary. However, the latter did not find significant difference between the effect of decontextualized and contextualized tasks on vocabulary learning. This finding may suggest that both methods can be useful in learning vocabulary.
Furthermore, learning vocabulary through intensive reading activities can be integrated into task-based language teaching (TBLT) as a post-task activity in which learners may focus on form after they focused on meaning in the task-cycle since it is difficult for learners to focus on form and meaning simultaneously (Willis & Willis, 2007). Intensive reading may also be used as a pre-task or a post-task activity in TBLT in order to train learners to use some reading strategies to help them learn vocabulary on their own, such as guessing the meaning of new words

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