Using pictures in teaching vocabulary on Iranian EFL learners

Teaching vocabulary is an important issue for second or foreign language learning. So, the teacher needs to apply appropriate technique in his/her classroom. Using pictures in teaching vocabulary are appropriate technique to be applied in class. To achieve this purpose, 60 students were selected randomly among 200 students in a private institute in Sarableh city. These students were given the Solutions Placement Test in order to validate their proficiency levels. These participants were then randomly assigned to the experimental and control groups. Prior to the treatments, two groups sat for pre-tests. Then the students of experimental group were exposed to the treatments for fifteen sessions; that is, the words list which was selected from the students’ books were taught to the subjects. These words were taught to the experimental group using pictures while they were taught to the control groups not using pictures. After the treatments, two groups sat for post-tests. Then, the results of mean scores were interpreted by using Independent-Sample T-Test. The T-test analysis indicated that the difference in the post-test means between the control group (M=22.46) and the experimental group (M=35.71) was statistically significant (t=6.11, df=58, 2-tailed p˂.0,05), because the P value (0.0002) was lower than 0.05. Therefore, it is suggested for English teacher to use pictures in their teaching to improve the students’ ability in vocabulary.

Keywords:

vocabulary , teaching , pictures , learning , EFL learner