Effects of English Proficiency and Gender on the Performances of the Keyword Method for English Vocabulary Learning

• Main Authors: CHENG, PEI-FEN, 鄭佩芬
• Other Authors: CHEN, MEI-CHEN
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2019
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/m9c892

碩士 === 國立屏東大學 === 應用英語學系碩士班 === 107 === 　　The keyword method was one of the most extensively studied mnemonic techniques among a great variety of vocabulary learning research. To date, very little empirical research has explored the relations of the keyword efficacy to both English proficiency and gender, especially in the local EFL context of Taiwan. The aim of the present study was to probe the efficacy of the keyword method on EFL junior high school students’ vocabulary learning. The factors of English proficiency and gender were further examined in the framework of the instructional benefit of this memory technique. Two of four intact classes of 142 eighth graders were randomly assigned to the experimental group and the other two classes to the control group to receive the keyword instruction or the conventional rehearsal instruction by coin flipping. The experimental group had 72 students (M= 33, F=39), and the control group, 70 students (M= 37, F= 33). Individual keyword interviews were given to the experimental students (N=18) for their perception and difficulty of learning new words through the imagery keyword technique, and the control students (N=18) for their preferred vocabulary learning strategies through think-aloud procedures. For the data analyses, Independent Samples t-tests were conducted to compare the performances of the two groups for the immediate and one-week delayed posttests, respectively. Two-way ANOVA procedures were applied to detect the benefit effects of English proficiency or gender interacting with the teaching method for both tests. The important results showed that (1) junior high school students performed significantly better in vocabulary learning with the keyword instruction than with the conventional rehearsal instruction; (2) the students performed significantly better with the keyword-provided instruction than with the keyword-generated instruction; (3) each of the ability groups (high, mid, and low) benefited from the keyword instruction; (4) the high-ability learners benefited from the instruction more than the mid-ability or low-ability ones; (5) the females significantly benefited more than the males; (6) for the keyword interviews, all of the high-achievers (100%) being interviewed reported higher preference over the keyword instruction in comparison with the mid-achievers (83%) and low-achievers (83%); (7) for the control interviews, verbal repetition, written repetition, and syllabification were the common strategies for the eighth-graders to remember new words. Pedagogical implications and suggestions for further research were provided to conclude the study.