Abstract
This mixed-method case study was conducted to probe how a set of pictures had an influence on a group of EFL university students’ retention of English words. Seven Thai university participants, enrolling in the course of English for Service Industry, were voluntarily engaged in the study. They took a pretest of 45 words they learned in class through the use of pictorial input for one semester, and right after the posttest, they recalled how they could remember the words in an individually stimulated recall protocol session. The result of T-test from Wilcoxon sign-ranked test showed that the pretest and posttest scores were significantly different at the 0.05 level. Interestingly, the qualitative accounts from the stimulated recall revealed that apart from the pictorial input the participants learned in class, they also employed other strategies to help them memorize the vocabulary. The findings from the study; therefore, shed lights on cognitive-metacognitive processing and strategies an individual EFL learner adopted, and most importantly, on how teachers can encourage their learners to orchestrate them and make the best use of pictures in order to learn ESP vocabulary effectively.
Highlights
Importance of Vocabulary in English Language LearningVocabulary knowledge is considered both necessary and important for language learners. Laufer (1977) argued that vocabulary is central, because of its importance for language learning and for using it
The first section is to answer the first research question on whether the picture use has any effects on word retention
According to the results above, the null hypothesis is rejected. It means that pictorial input had an effect on word memory with the statistical significance level at
Summary
Importance of Vocabulary in English Language LearningVocabulary knowledge is considered both necessary and important for language learners. Laufer (1977) argued that vocabulary is central, because of its importance for language learning and for using it. Importance of Vocabulary in English Language Learning. Vocabulary knowledge is considered both necessary and important for language learners. Laufer (1977) argued that vocabulary is central, because of its importance for language learning and for using it. If the learners do not know the key words’ meanings in a sentence, it is unlikely that they will be able to get the gist of what is being communicated, leading to communication failure. Further importance to words is advocated by Thornbury (2002), who pointed out that grammatical knowledge is less crucial for effective communication compared to knowledge of vocabulary. With decent word knowledge but poor or basic of grammar, can still understand the content. If s/he has little knowledge about the words used in a sentence, it is highly unlikely that mutual understanding will occur. In an attempt to support the students to learn words efficiently, a group of language teachers and researchers have tried to identify effective strategies for vocabulary learning. Nation (2001)
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