Explicit, Implicit, and Blended Vocabulary Instruction: Efficiency in an Aviation English Course

Abstract

This paper reports on the results of vocabulary teaching sessions in an Aviation English Course conducted with three different groups of 12 fourth-year undergraduate students at the Flight Academy of the National Aviation University in Ukraine . The research objective was to identify how the explicit, the implicit, and the blended instruction influenced the students’ progress in Aviation English vocabulary acquisition. Experimental data was analyzed following the grounded theory approach. Each group took a pretest, a post-test, and a delayed test. The results showed that all three types of vocabulary instruction had a positive effect on the learning and recall of aviation vocabulary. The students who received the explicit treatment statistically outperformed the other two treatment groups in the posttest, based on immediate word acquisition. The results of the delayed test demonstrated that blended instruction was the most efficient approach in terms of delayed vocabulary retention as compared to a solely implicit or explicit teaching method. Therefore, we conclude that Aviation English classroom practices should incorporate a balanced approach employing both implicit and explicit vocabulary instruction.