Initially, 52 full-time male students took part in the study but the information of 11 participants
was removed from the data analysis because of absenteeism during the second phase of the study.
At the end, 41 participants were present. The participants were homogeneous with respect to social
environment and type of instruction, so these intervening variables were controlled in the study.
They were all from the western region of Saudi Arabia and their home language was Arabic. All
had received six years of English language instruction at school, following the same syllabus,
before entering university, and none had lived in an English-speaking country. All the participants
had pre-intermediate or intermediate level mastery of English. They scored 60% on Version 1 of
the Vocabulary Level Test (Schmitt et al., 2001) at the 2000-word level. Their average raw score
was 22.2/30 (SD=6.70), indicating that they had sufficient receptive knowledge of almost all of