The effect of hot seat technique on Iraqi EFL intermediate School students' performance in vocabulary

الملخص EN

-Vocabulary has an essential role in teaching and learning English as a foreign language.

Learning vocabulary is considered as the first step in teaching and learning the foreign language.

However, the lack of vocabulary hinders learner' communication using English since vocabulary is regarded one of the most important language components that link the four learners' skills all together.

So, EFL learners should be able to acquire adequate numbers of words and retain those, that they have learned before, to achieve effective communication that is the main aim behind teaching/ learning English.

However, in Iraqi EFL classrooms, there are great problems and difficulties facing both teachers of English and their learners in teaching and learning vocabulary.

A number of effective techniques are advised to be adopted by the teachers in teaching vocabulary.

Hot Seat is seen as an efficient technique to teach vocabulary.

It is not only teaching technique, but it is, also, one of fun and interesting language guessing games.

This study aims at investigating the effect of Hot Seat technique on Iraqi EFL intermediate school students' performance in vocabulary This aim is achieved by the following null hypothesis which states that there is no statistically significant difference between the mean score of the performance of the experimental group students who are taught vocabulary by Hot Seat technique and that of the control group students who are taught vocabulary by the traditional technique in the vocabulary post-test.

The study is limited to the students of the first intermediate class in the city of Kerbala during the academic year 2018-2019.

The results prove that there is a statistically significant difference between the mean scores of the performance of the experimental group students who are taught vocabulary by Hot Seat technique and that of the control group students who are taught vocabulary by the traditional technique in the vocabulary post-test in favor of the experimental group.

Based on the above result, some conclusions, pedagogical recommendations and a number of further proposed studied have been put forward.