| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立屏東教育大學 === 英語學系 === 98 === The purpose of the present study aims to investigate the effect of different techniques of vocabulary instruction on EFL elementary school students’ vocabulary learning and retention so as to improve their learning and retention of foreign words.
Ninety two fifth graders from an elementary school in Pingtung City participated in this study and all of them received the three techniques of vocabulary instruction, which were visual aids, contextual inference, and semantic mapping. The researcher of the present study designed a pretest to divide the subjects into high-, mid-, and low-level students. She also gave the subjects a new word test to determine the thirty target words for later instruction. To evaluate the subjects’ performance, she employed self-made tests for both the immediate and the retained recall tests to find out how well the three different techniques of vocabulary instruction facilitated the students’ vocabulary learning and retention. Besides, she gave the students a questionnaire to understand the students’ beliefs about the three different techniques of vocabulary instruction. The students’ scores on the recall tests were analyzed using the descriptive statistics, repeated measures, and pairwise comparisons of SPSS and the students’ responses to the questionnaire were interpreted in terms of percentage.
The results of recall tests showed that visual aids facilitated the students’ vocabulary learning most, followed by semantic mapping and contextual inference, irrespective of proficiency levels of the students. However, semantic mapping assisted the high- and low-level students in retaining the new words best, whereas visual aids helped the mid-level students most. Moreover, the results of the questionnaire indicated that most students not only favored visual aids and semantic mapping but also considered them helpful for their vocabulary learning.
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