The purpose of this study is to examine which teaching methodology – context provision or imagination elicitation – is more efficient to learn emotional vocabulary in the English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom. A pre-test / post-test design was used to test the benefit of the two types of instruction, compared to a traditional teaching method. A total of 60 EFL students at a B2 level (Council of Europe, 2001, 2018) participated in the research. A set of 40 emotional words was selected according to the following criteria: to be emotional and mid-frequency vocabulary in English, and rather unknown words by B2-level students in order to allow room for learning. Statistical analyses showed that the instruction phase was successful, since the groups significantly differed in the post-test. Although the two experimental treatments were effective, the imagination elicitation approach turned out to be better than the context provision method. The conclusion has relevant pedagogical implications for the EFL classroom.
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