Facilitating Vocabulary Learning with Pictures

Facilitating Vocabulary Learning with Pictures

  The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of using pictures to intentionally teach Korean high school students low frequency vocabulary. Additionally, it aimed to observe how the learning experience of being engaged with pictures promoted their retention of the target vocabulary. Moreover, this study has attempted to explore how Korean high school students use vocabulary learning strategies. Seventy students from a girls’ high school participated in this study. All of the participants took a Vocabulary Levels Test (VLT) as a pretest and received a different treatment (target vocabulary list with pictures or without pictures) divided into two groups. After that, the posttest was administered to see how many vocabulary items they could remember from the treatment. To measure their retention ability in each group, the participants all took a delayed test after one month. Their vocabulary learning strategies could be found through a survey. The results of this study demonstrated that the students in picture group outperformed the students in non-picture group. In addition, picture group students displayed superior retention ability to non-picture group students. The participants were found to employ a variety of vocabulary learning strategies though no significant differences were observed between the groups.