Investigating Learners’ Retention of Lexical Items through the Use of Visual Aids.

Abstract

Visual aids are those instructional aids which are used in the classroom to encourage students learning process. Although their use in teaching English as a foreign language is widely acknowledged among teachers and learners, visual aids’ role on memory span and retrieval is not much highlighted. In other words, the effect of visual aids on long-term memory is not clear as far as teaching new vocabulary is concerned. Therefore, this research is an attempt to investigate how visual aids affect the memorization of new vocabulary. For the sake of collecting more information, a quasi-experimental design was adopted to check the effects of teaching new words and vocabulary through visual aids on learners’ memory. Thus, a questionnaire is administered to both teachers and students from Slimene Ben Hmaza and Chikh Bouamama secondary schools, Tiaret. Besides, an experimental group was exposed to a pre-test, a lesson of teaching vocabulary through visual aids and a post-test. After that, their results are compared with the control group The results showed a strong correlation between the adopted visual aids and students’ retrieval and memorization to the taught vocabulary. The findings also showed that students face many difficulties in learning and retrieving vocabulary such as forgetfulness, unawareness of effective strategies to do so and the use of traditional methods by their teachers. The latter hinder their comprehension, memorization and recall of the learnt lexis. Therefore, this study tried to stress the use of modern and innovative teaching materials such as visual aids, and encourage students learn and use effective strategies that may help them learn and retain vocabulary longer.