Strategies to Expand EFL Learners' Word Retention through Story Retelling vs. Story Role-playing

Teaching new words is indispensable to every EFL teacher's teaching experience. This is because of the importance of expanding word knowledge that no one can deny as a tool for efficient communication. First, this study aimed to investigate intentional word-list learning and incidental word learning inside stories. Moreover, the significant impact of role-playing and retelling strategy on students' retention of the words and meaning was assessed. Additionally, productive and passive retention of vocabulary enhancement was investigated to judge the effectiveness of different storytelling methods in improving learners' retention of new words.Thus, 24 pre-intermediate L2 learners were randomly assigned to 3 equal groups. The control group was exposed to word-list learning, and the treatment groups were instructed on new words through role-playing, narrating the stories, and word-list learning through learning words by L1 translation. The 2 methods of role-playing and narrating stories demanded the learners to practice the new words by memorizing the exact dialogues and paraphrasing the dialogues. Final assessments were used to check which of the 2 vocabulary learning methods best-promoted word retention. The findings provide implications for introducing and implementing storytelling with role-playing strategies and narrating for teenage groups from the starting point to enhance word retention compared with word-list learning.