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In the modern world, English has become a global language spoken in over sixty countries. English language proficiency is essential for cross-cultural communication and the necessity to know the language is constantly growing. This necessity leads to the problem of finding qualified teachers that can give students a chance to practice their language skills. Vocabulary is the most essential part of second language (L2) learning (Ling, 2010), and recently has become a topic of discussion for researchers, school curriculum designers (Jun Zhang & Annual, 2008; Nation, 2001) and others involved in L2 learning.
The problem of vocabulary acquisition is one of the most significant barriers to mastering foreign languages. In a spoken language, about 1,800 words constitute about 80% of the spoken corpus (McCarthy, 2004). Because some frequent words are often repeated, it is thought that learners can understand a large proportion of foreign language conversation with a relatively small vocabulary (McCarten, 2007). The importance of vocabulary is explained by Wilkins, who states: “without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed” (Wilkins, 1972). However, previous research also suggests that although second language learners need to know a large number of words as a long-term goal, this is not an essential short-term goal (Nation, 2001).
A variety of approaches to vocabulary learning have been presented, but none have been proved to be the most effective way of studying language units. The way that new words are presented to students usually depends on teachers’ individual beliefs and teaching strategies. New possibilities for vocabulary acquisition can be found in the code-switching phenomenon, in which a word from one language is used in a sentence in which the grammatical structure belongs to another language. Code-switching presents a chance for students to think about new foreign language words in a deeper manner and offers the potential for expansion of the second language vocabulary. Recently this technique has become a target of interest for researchers in different domains, such as psychologists (Macaro, 2001), linguists (Coady & Huckin, 1997) and computer scientists (Labutov & Lipson, 2014).