The Effect of Visual Contextual Support and Glossary of Words on Guessing Meaning of New Vocabulary Items in English by Pre-university Male EFL Students

Abstract

The present study aims at investigating the impact of visual contextual support and Glossary of Words on EFL learners’ vocabulary learning. For this purpose, a total number of 60 male pre-university students were randomly selected after administering the English proficiency test to assure the homogeneity of the participants. The learners were assigned to three homogeneous groups, 2 experimental groups, namely, visual contextual support and glossary of words and one control group to highlight the comparative purposes. During treatment, the first experimental group received a passage including new vocabulary items and visual contextual supports as treatment and the second experimental group received the same passage including new vocabulary items and the glossary of words as treatment. On the other hand, the control group received no treatment and they were just given the new vocabulary items of the same passages given to the experimental groups in order to guess the meaning of new words only by using their own vocabulary knowledge. To compare the probable differential impact of the study a pretest and posttest were applied to all three groups and the results of the tests were contrasted and analysed. For data analysis, the one-way ANOVA was administered for pretest and posttest. The results of the study demonstrated a significant improvement of vocabulary learning through utilizing visual contextual support in comparison to the glossary of words group and moreover than the control group.