A picture is worth a thousand words: the use of videos in vocabulary acquisition

Abstract

The objective of this study is to analyze to what extent it is better to use audiovisual material than listening materials for vocabulary development. In fact, it seeks for evidence on whether students retain more vocabulary after the double coding input of audiovisual resources or after having only-audio input; and whether retention rate of the vocabulary is similar in both conditions in immediate and delayed post-tests. The impact of the recognition method, written words vs. images, will also be taken into consideration. The participants in the study were a group of 16 high school students, age 13-14. The material used to test vocabulary retention was a piece of news in an audiovisual format, a video clip, and in an only-audio format, a recorded fragment. The instruments used in the project were a pre-test, in order to create a corpus of unknown vocabulary items, and a post-test with the words selected in which students had to match the words with their translation in some cases and with images in others. An immediate and two delayed (2 weeks and 4 weeks) administrations of the same post-test served to analyze retention rates.