The Effects of using semantic mapping strategy on students' ability to recall new
English vocabulary at Qassim University, Saudi Arabia
Waleed Al Abiky, PhD
ABSTRACT:
Vocabulary is a vital part of language teaching, and students' forgetting what they
have learned and memorized in school has widely been a common complain among
educators, parents and mentors (Farrand et la. 2002); Semantic mapping strategy has
been considered a highly regarded form of elaborative learning (Novak 2005; Nesbitt
and Adescope 2006) which encourages a deeper learning process for better memory
formation. The current study investigates the impact of using semantic mapping
strategy on students' ability to better learn and easily recall the new vocabulary that
they have learned. In fall 2012, the study started, and subjects, who were male
undergraduate Saudi students at Qassim University, were divided into two groups: acontrol group which consisted of (50) students and taught by the conventional way of
teaching vocabulary, and b- experimental group which also consisted of (50) students
who were introduced to and taught the new vocabulary by semantic mapping using
drawings, pictures and projector to show word mapping. Students in both groups were
taught 400 words in four weeks period. The findings indicate that 1) the semantic
mapping strategy was highly effective, 2) subjects in the experimental group,
introduced to and taught by semantic mapping, were faster in memorizing the new
vocabulary with its forms: definition, spelling, pronunciation, and recognition, 3)
subjects in group (b) scored significantly higher in learning the new English
vocabulary list than those in group (a), 4) subjects in the experimental group could
recall the new English vocabulary list significantly longer, up to 60 % than those in
the control group.
Key words: semantic mapping, strategy, recall, students' ability, and English
vocabulary.
Research overview:
Currently, It has been estimated that more than a billion and half people around the
world speak and understand English in various levels (Lazaro & Dorothea, 2004). As
a result, teaching and learning English is becoming even more necessary for the
following generations, especially with the massive expansion of technology and
modern communication which has made the universe a small village.
Vocabulary is, however, a crucial part of any given language, and it would be the
thing that all learners, teachers and researchers would agree upon its importance in
second language competence (Shmitt, 2008, Al-Zahrani, 2011). It has been,
moreover, argued that when students could not understand the key words in a text, it
is more likely that they either would not understand the text as a whole or miss a large
portion of it which might lead to a misunderstanding or misinterpretation of it (Christ
& Wang, 2010).
Symantec mapping, as a result, has been introduced as an effective strategy to help
foreign languages' students to learn vocabulary better and recall what they have
learned easily (Hallie, Yopp & Bishop, 2009, and Baleghizadeh & Naeim, 2011).
Moreover, as Irvin (1990) points out that this effective strategy can be used as an
activity either before or after reading a passage or writing exercise. The Symantec
mapping strategy has been defined as " a visual strategy for graphically representing
concepts, terms or words by displaying in categories words related to one another."
(Wang & Yu, 2008, Foil & Alber, 2002). So, it is a group of words visually presented
which relate to each other in one way or another.
The study here is trying to investigate the effectiveness of using semantic mapping
strategy on Saudi students' ability, who were studying at Qassim University in fall
2012, to learn and easily recall the new vocabulary that they have leaned. Subjects
were divided into groups: a) control group which consisted of (50) students and taught
by the conventional way of teaching vocabulary, and b) experimental group which
also consisted of (50) students who were introduced to and taught by semantic
mapping strategy. Students in both groups were taught 400 new vocabulary words in
four weeks periods; almost 100 new vocabulary were introduced and explained for
subject participants each week.
In the control group, no visual strategy or even instruction was used. Subjects were
taught in the conventional way of teaching vocabulary through their textbook only. In
contrast, visual strategy, mainly semantic mapping, was used and integrated into the
teaching of the new vocabulary for the experimental group; drawings, pictures and
projector showing the relationship between studied vocabulary were used. However,
subjects in both groups were given pre and post test; in which their knowledge of the
different forms of the 400 new vocabulary were assessed: definition, spelling,
pronunciation, and recognition . Before the treatment, pre-test were administered for
both groups, and no significant differences were detected. In fact, pre-test scores were
very similar in both groups and no significant differences were found.
The findings indicated that 1) the semantic mapping strategy was highly effective, 2)
subjects in the experimental group, introduced to and taught by semantic mapping,
were faster in memorizing the new vocabulary with its forms: definition, spelling,
pronunciation, and recognition, 3) subjects in group (b) were significantly different in
learning the new English vocabulary list than those who were not introduced with the
strategy, 4) students could recall the new English vocabulary list significantly longer,
up to 60 % than the control group.