The Effect of Teaching Vocabulary via Textbook versus Social Media on Creativity Level of Iranian EFL Learners

This article aimed at investigating the effect of teaching vocabulary via textbooks and social media on the creativity level of Iranian EFL learners. To this purpose, 40 Iranian EFL learners at the intermediate level be involved in a pretest-posttest study after taking the (OQP) test. They were between 13 to 18 years old. The creativity questionnaire was administered as the pretest and posttest. All the participants were at the same level of proficiency and both groups (experimental & control) contained male and female learners. Each group involved 20 participants. Both groups received an explanation about the purpose and an explanation of how they should act. The experimental group was taught vocabulary items via Telegram while the control group learned the new words through traditional methods. After taking the posttest and analyzing the data, the results showed that the experimental group outperformed the control group in terms of creativity. Thus, it can be concluded that the training program could have positive effects on the experimental group for creativity improvement and the traditional way was not effective. Finally, it was revealed that gender had no significant effect in using social media to improve creativity. Social media include various creative activities that could help learners inside and outside the classroom effectively.