Abstract
This paper aims to highlight the significance of color that captivates human attention in learning English collocations in an educational setting. In order to expedite the impact of color on memory, an empirical research was conducted, in which 30 South Asian ESL students of a local university in China were selected as participants, equally divided into the experimental and the control groups. All the participants were taught literal and context-based meanings of 30 English collocations for three consecutive days. A pre-test and a post-test were administered to assess the impact of color on the students’ working memory in learning English collocations. Prior to assessing the impact of color on memory, the participants in the experimental group were exposed to the underlined collocations as written on colorful papers (yellow), while same collocations were imprinted on simple white color papers for the controlled group. A t-test was administered for the statistical analysis of the data. Comparatively, in the post-test, the participants in the experimental group remarkably outperformed while retrieving English collocations and their meanings by the virtue of yellow color. The finding of the current paper lends support to the notion that color, as an environmental stimulus, may greatly affect human working memory in learning English collocations. The study is expected to provide implications to text and curriculum designers by supplementing ESL learners with colorful texts and images in order to harness their language efficiencies and performances.
Highlights
Working memory is an enthralling area of psycholinguistics, yet it goes through certain complex learning processes in retrieving different images, colors and vocabulary
By administering the post-test, we observed that participants in the experimental group outperformed to the controlled group after attempting MCQs in questionnaires which had yellow background color by retrieving the exact meaning of English collocations even after an interval of two weeks
Noteworthy to say that the probability value that we achieved is 0.04, which is less than 0.05 and hereby indicates that our null hypothesis is wrong
Summary
Working memory is an enthralling area of psycholinguistics, yet it goes through certain complex learning processes in retrieving different images, colors and vocabulary. Familiarity with color naming process inside texts further on provides enormous opportunities to ESL learners by learning various idiomatic expressions and collocations such as bright eyes and pale face standing for hope and fear, red cheeks and brown hair standing for beauty and glamour In this frame of reference, the current research is theoretically necessary to bridge the empirical gap pertinent to the effect of color on memory of English vocabulary but is practically significant for enhancing the mastery of English vocabulary by changing the way in which English words and expressions are presented visually in teaching materials as well as in classroom presentation. Our current paper is designed to investigate how the selected South Asian ESL learners get command over English collocations they are exposed to with questionnaires having yellow color overlays in the post-test
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