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Exploring Taiwanese Educational Culture using Two Mnemonic Approaches for the

Vocabulary Development

Victor Kuan, Kenshin Huang

Colorado State University

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Introduction

The main purposes of this project are to see by teaching with two mnemonic strategies,

whether the targets students from Taiwanese senior high school can get higher scores on

vocabulary tests or not, compared with the former vocabulary test scores and whether or not

the Asian educational culture affects the result. Vialle (2013) indicates that evidence shows

South and East Asian background students academically out-perform their peers in Australian

primary and secondary school, due to the reasons of “their work ethic, motivation, and

aspirations, and the support and expectations of their parents” (p. 4).

On the other hand, in terms of educational culture, according to French (1983), grammar

should have more of an emphasis rather vocabulary during classes. Most of the Taiwanese

teachers do not teach students how to learn a word or use any approaches to help students

memorize vocabulary. When focusing on mnemonic strategies, it can better help learners in

knowing the word meanings and consolidating it and are especially needed when they are

encouraged to learn independently (Celce-Murcia, 2001). Our findings revealed that,

compared with pre and post-test, the students performed only slightly better on average

scores which may imply that the Asian educational culture does affect students’ learning

outcomes. Nonetheless, the result suggests that mnemonic devices are somewhat useful for

the target students acquiring new words by conducting mnemonic strategies (visualization or

imagination and storytelling).

Literature review

The teacher, Jazmin, who helped us to conduct two approaches for helping students

better memorize vocabulary, seldom focused or took time to illustrate ways of learning new

vocabulary. In fact, Mohammad and Ketabi (2011) indicate that the language teaching and

learning of English have been omitted of vocabulary. French (1983) argues that vocabulary

has been omitted in the past decades for several reasons: (1) teacher preparation programs

typically emphasize grammar instruction more than vocabulary instruction; (2) students

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might make mistakes in the sentence structure if there are numerous words to learn before the

initial grammar rules are taught; (3) some people said that the meaning of the word can only

be learned by experience and cannot be taught in the class. Yang and Dai (2012) suggest that

vocabulary is now the broadest and most unmanageable part in learning any language

regardless of the foreign language or mother tongue. Word meanings can change in different

contexts, which makes words seem to be infinite to acquire. Yet, there is no language

acquisition that can be done without learning vocabulary.

Tseng and Schmitt (2008) indicate that one of the essential parts of mastering English

is vocabulary. Read (2004) points out second language learners are typically aware of the

importance of vocabulary knowledge. Learners who lack vocabulary knowledge might

struggle in their ability to communicate effectively in the target language, since lexical items

carry basic information of meanings they hope to comprehend or express. However, how

much vocabulary do learners need to know in order to comprehend a reading text? How

much vocabulary do learners need to know to produce an understandable spoken text? Laufer

(1989) suggests that to comprehend a text of spoken or written discourse, learners need to

reach 95% understanding of the words. With only 95% coverage of a certain text, that means

there are 5 unknown words for every hundred words. Therefore, Nation (2001) suggests that

most learners “need 98% coverage to gain adequate comprehension of a fiction text. In order

to comprehend a language, it is obvious that learners need to master the knowledge of

vocabulary at many levels.

Nonetheless, Min and Hsu (2008) argue that English teachers in Taiwan often focus on

sentence patterns and translation instruction without putting emphasis on vocabulary teaching.

Taiwanese students are typically taught vocabulary by giving the Chinese translation first,

and having them memorize the vocabulary without additional instruction. Hence, students

would have to learn by rote memorization, which eventually leads them feeling bored. To

explain this situation, Shen (2003) indicates that Taiwanese English teachers are not well

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trained and have not received sufficient training in reading research articles, due to the

undergraduate courses of English department focus on the vocabulary acquisition

substantially. Furthermore, many teachers find the difficulty of getting access to research

articles. Therefore, Taiwanese English teachers sometimes lack professional knowledge on

teaching methods, specifically vocabulary.

Mnemonic strategy

Mnemonic devices are memory enhancing instructional strategies that involve teaching

students to link new information taught to information they already know (Yang & Dai,

2012). When focusing on mnemonic strategies, it can better help learners in knowing the

words meanings and consolidating words. Mnemonic strategies are especially helpful as they

to encourage students to learn independently (Amiryousefi & Ketabi, 2011). Students mostly

face the problems of forgetting the new learned words easily. Researchers have tried to

examine different vocabulary learning strategies to solve this problem. Mnemonic devices

and strategies have showed that they can be helpful in memorizing new words (Farjami,

2007). The general concept of the mental lexicon is one in which there is a variety of links

between words, some strong and some weak. If material is presented somehow that relates or

matches the thing that is already known, it would be held for much longer and more easily

retrieved through verbal or visual clues. In other words, using mnemonic strategies can

integrate new information with information that students already had in their long-term

memory (Yang & Dai, 2012).

Researchers have classified mnemonic devices into different classes. For example,

Thompson (1987), arranges mnemonic strategies into five classes: linguistic, spatial, visual,

physical response and verbal. Rivers (1983) summarizes the language learners’ common

strategies of learning vocabulary: first some make lists and memorize them; second, some

read a great deal and mark words they do not know each time they meet them, thus creating

their own frequency counts; third, some write down words in a short context, repeatedly write

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down the same words until their meaning and use are acquired; fourth, some make

associations with words that sound or look similar in their native language, even though the

meaning may be different; fifth, some practice using new words as they talk to themselves in

order to commit them to long-term memory; sixth, some use dictionaries.

In conclusion, as we can see that numerous researchers propose the importance and

effectiveness by implementing mnemonic strategies into vocabulary instructions. Therefore,

we randomly select two of the methods that are proposed by Amiryousefi and Ketabi (2011),

which are the visual method (imagery strategy) and the verbal method (storytelling).

Two mnemonic strategies

1. Visualization or imagery strategy allows a word to be visualized. The learner imagines a

picture or a scene, which is associated with the target word. Abstract words can be

learned through this method by relating them to a visual picture (Amiryousefi & Ketabi,

2011). Visualization can be an aid in vocabulary learning. “If the new word is exploration,

the learner may come up with this mental picture ‘A scientist is using special drills for oil

exploration’ by relating it to the picture of a scientist. Again the students may come up

with different pictures because people’s experiences are different.” (Amiryousefi &

Ketabi, 2011, p. 180)

2. Storytelling or the narrative chain allows learners to link the words together by a story. At

first, they should use the target words with a topic and connect them by making up a story

containing these words (Amiryousefi & Ketabi, 2011).

Asian educational culture

In 2013, Vialle’s study suggested that South and East Asian background students

academically out-perform their peers in Australian primary and secondary school based on a

large portion of studies. In Australia, the selective high schools are government-funded schools

which require students to pass an entrance exam. It is extremely competitive for those who try

to get higher education. Hence, only top-performing students can enroll. However, one of the

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top Sydney selective high schools has 97% of the student body that has a language background

other than English (LBOTE), while there is only one top ten school that has fewer than 80% of

LBOTE students. While most of the LBOTE students are Asian, what makes the Asian

students out-perform the others? Asian students who have superior performance are mostly

from East and Southeast Asia and belong to the nations with a Confucian value system (Dandy

& Nettelbeck, 2002). The Confucian values of effort and reward with Asian immigrants’ belief

in education means to move upward within social mobility. Confucian values also suggest the

obedience to parents. “A salient feature of the father-child relationship is the unquestioned

obedience of the son to the authority of the father” (Tu, 1985, p. 234). According to Vialle’s

interview with Asian parents, they say, “Children always respect their elders and their teachers.

This is very important for them to do well at school” (Vialle, 2013, p. 20). Hence, parental

influences play a critical role in Asian students’ learning outcomes. For example, many Asian

parents would stand outside of the classroom to see if their children are paying attention. If not,

the parents would go into the classroom and discipline their children. Furthermore, many

parents in Vialle’s (2013) study, often require their children to do long hours of work or make

personal sacrifices, which include several activities like “music lessons, dancing and hiring

personal tutors for additional coaching in academic subjects” (p. 19). The proportion of Asian

parents who are hiring personal tutors is considerably high. Vialle (2013) wanted to do a

research study to analyze the effectiveness of private tutoring but he could not find a sufficient

amount of students who were not being tutored to serve as a comparison group. Asian parents

who hire personal tutors set learning pathways for their children from the beginning of school

in order to make sure that they are selected into the selective main stream high school in late

primary and secondary school. Chua (2011) states Chinese parents require perfect grades for

their children, but if the children do not get the perfect grades, they simply assume their

children do not do their best or work hard enough. Though the Asian students have to do the

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parent-demand activities and homework at the same time, the parents believe that these would

improve children with strong self-efficacy and self-regulation skills (Vialle, 2013).

Taiwan is no exception to this Asian educational culture. Chang (2008) conducted a

survey about Taiwanese parents’ attitudes toward English learning. Over 489 participants

were in this study. Approximately 95% of the parents showed agreement about the

importance of learning English. In addition, approximately 67% of the parents let their

children start learning English before the age 8. Though there were only 41.3% of the parents

who sent their children to the cram school to study English, there were 73.7% of the parents

that reported that they were going to force their children to study in the cram school at a

younger age. With such high demand from the public, according to Taiwanese Ministry of

Education (2015), there are 18,819 cram schools all over Taiwan and the amount of cram

schools has increased by more than 4,000 added over the past five years. Generally, there

would be at least 3 cram schools around any given public or private school.

Hypothesis

In Taiwan, most students do not have appropriate learning strategies for their vocabulary

learning and teachers seldom provide proper instruction on vocabulary acquisition. Teachers

always let their students memorize the words by themselves. Oftentimes students end up

memorizing the vocabulary at cram schools or at a private English institution. Though their

parents might schedule and force them to work hard on the target vocabulary, the question

remains. How can we help the other students who cannot memorize the vocabulary efficiently

without guidance? Researchers have tried to examine different vocabulary learning strategies

to solve this problem and mnemonic devices and strategies have showed that they can help

students be successful in vocabulary learning (Farjami, 2007).

For this study, our pedagogical approaches aim at changing the student’s learning

situation in two different classes. By utilizing visualization or imagination and storytelling, we

expect students can perform better on the vocabulary tests. Nonetheless, we want to find out

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whether or not using the mnemonic strategies can contribute to students’ vocabulary learning

outcomes, regardless of the Asian educational culture background.

Research question: Will the target students show improvement between vocabulary pre- and

post-tests regardless of the educational cultural issues they face?

Methodology

The two pedagogical methods that we used are visualization and story-telling. We

successfully contacted a teacher, Jazmin, who teaches in Dong Shang senior high school in

Taiwan. We discussed our teaching approaches with her through the Skype online chat, and we

reached a consensus on these two teaching methods. Lesson plans were developed by us, so

there was a clear procedure to conduct the classes (see Appendix A).

There were 42 students in class A, and there were 36 students in class B. Jazmin took one

class hour to conduct the aforementioned approaches. In the past, she used to let her students

memorize the vocabulary on their own before teaching the lecture. Then the teacher would

use a Chinese translation for each word they needed to fill out on each test. For example: 書

(n)_____, the answer is “book”. The teacher was asked to teach the two mnemonic learning

strategies to her students. We compared these two classes by using different methods in each

class. The first one is the approach of visualization in the class A and Jazmin guided her

students to imagine a picture when they learned the vocabulary (see Appendix B). For example,

when she taught a new word ‘jewel’, the students were asked to imagine the following picture

such as, “An adventurer is looking for jewel.” Before imagining the picture, Jazmin needed to

explain the word precisely, and we designed flash cards for each word to show the students.

The students then used their imagination to draw a picture or describe the scene in their brain.

This approach focused on the learners’ impressions, and they could memorize the vocabulary

long term in a short time.

The students of class B were taught new vocabulary by telling a story that we designed

(see Appendix C). The story included 20 words and every single word in the story was easy so

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that students could infer the word from the context. For instance, “The thief stole gold and

‘jewels’ because they are valuable”. At the beginning, the students could figure out which thing

is related to gold, what the thief wanted to steal, and what is valuable. There are three clues in

the sentence and the students can easily get the word and understand. After using these two

approaches, the teacher gave these two classes the same post-test after one day. We compared

the scores between the pre- and post-tests. The pre-test scores came from the previous lesson,

which the teacher did not give any instruction of vocabulary.

Result

We compared the scores from the pre-test and post-test in order to see if there was any

different effect on vocabulary learning when students utilized two different mnemonic

approaches. See table 1 and 2 below for Class A’s pre- and post-tests.

Result from class A

Table 1

The pre-test from class A

N MIN MAX MEANS SD

SCORE 42 68 100 87.74 10.012

Table 2

The post-test from A

N MIN MAX MEANS SD

SCORE 42 70 100 90.83 8.184

As we can see comparing the two sets of data, although the minimum scores are still not

much variable, the average scores do improve slightly by 3 points and the standard deviation

declines by two points. To explain this situation, the approach that uses visualization does

appear to influence the students in some ways that help learners memorize the target words,

especially in class. The reason we emphasize the visualization approach especially help

learners only in class is that the pre- and post-test’s minimum score still retain in lower score

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which is 68 and 70. The standard deviation of post-test does become less than the pre-test, the

difference become smaller. This means that maybe some students do not study as diligently

after class as others. But by using this approach, the students who do not like to study after

class still have memorized the target words while the instructor teaches vocabulary. Students

can gain higher scores without studying nearly as much after class because they have now

acquired a useful strategy.

Result from class B

Table 3

The pre-test from class B

N MIN MAX MEANS SD

SCORE 36 60 100 86.14 11.559

Table 4

The post-test from class B

N MIN MAX MEANS SD

SCORE 36 70 100 89.03 9.623

Again here as we can see from the pre- and post-test, the minimum score became slightly

higher and so did the average score. The standard deviation also slightly declined meaning the

difference of individuals’ scores become smaller. Students are acquiring a new useful learning

strategy through this story-telling approach. We assume that there must be some students who

do not like to study after class but still benefited from the teacher’s instruction.

Conclusion

Researchers suggest that mnemonic strategies help learners memorize vocabulary. When

the instructors focus on mnemonic strategies, it can help learners better remember word

meanings (Celce-Murcia, 2001). From the results, we can see that the two approaches

conducted in the Taiwanese senior high school class appeared to be slightly better than the

non-method approach. To better illustrate the result since there is only slight improvement

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compared with pre- and post-test, we would like to point out that though there is some

evidence that shows the benefits of mnemonic strategies, the learners might have studied the

vocabulary or the school works in cram schools.

In Taiwanese educational culture, most of the parents always have their children go the

cram schools after school. Therefore, the cram school might have already taught the tested

vocabulary or might have already pushed the students to memorize the tested vocabulary.

This might be the reason for the high scores of the pre-test.

Lastly, this case study asked a Taiwanese teacher to conduct and finish without a

supervisor, so it could be not objective since we only let the teacher conduct the experiment for

one class hour one time. We are not sure whether the students get involved with or participate

the activities when the teacher asks them to do so. Furthermore, each student has their own

learning preference, which means we cannot guarantee that both of these two approaches are

suitable for each student.

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References

Amiryousefi, M., & Ketabi, S. (2011). Mnemonic Instruction: A Way to Boost

Vocabulary Learning and Recall. Journal of Language Teaching and Research,

2(1), 178-182.

Chang, Y. F. (2008). Parents’ attitudes toward the English education policy in

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Chua, A. (2011). Battle hymn of the tiger mother. New York: Penguin.

Dandy, J. & Nettelbeck, T. (2002b). The relationship between IQ, homework,

aspirations and academic achievement for Chinese, Vietnamese and Anglo-Celtic

Australian school children. Educational Psychology, 22, 267-275.

Farjami, H. (2007). Picture production and picture perception: comparing two

modes of practicing concrete vocabulary. IJAL, 10 (1), 1-14.

French, A.V. (1983). Techniques in Teaching Vocabulary. Oxford University Press.

Jodi R. (2012), 120 Content Strategies for English Language Learners, Pearson

Education Press

Laufer, B. (1989). What percentage of text-lexis is essential for comprehension? In

C. Lauren and M. Nordman (Eds.) Special language: From humans to thinking

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Mary E. V. & Jana E. (2008). 99 Ideas and Activities for Teaching English Learners

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Saeed, K. (2011). Mnemonic Instruction: A Way to Boos Vocabulary Learning and Recall.

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Tseng, W. T., & Schmitt, N. (2008). Toward a Model of Motivated Vocabulary

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Appendix A

Two Approaches of Lesson Plans

I. Visualization or imagery way

Lesson Plan

Topic: Unit 3 The Happy Prince

Time: 50min Grade: 12th

Teaching Method and Materials:

Target Vocabulary:

statue jewel leaf gold metal sword ugliness handle sunlight perfect

tear palace hall misery princess orphan starving beg destroy

precious

20 min Using flash cards to teach students the vocabulary.

Explain each word precisely.

10 min To ask student to imagine the picture of each word.

10 min Activity: The teacher says the word, and the students draw the picture.

10 min Go over the handout.

II. Story- telling or the narrative chain

Lesson Plan

Topic: Unit 3 The Happy Prince

Time: 50min Grade: 12th

Teaching Method and Materials:

Target Vocabulary:

statue jewel leaf gold metal sword ugliness handle sunlight perfect

tear palace hall misery princess orphan starving beg destroy

precious

20 min To tell the story to the students, and explain the word precisely.

10 min To ask the students to divide into groups and each group has to design a

context including three of twenty words. The words cannot be overlapped.

10 min Activity: To assign student to say the context they designed.

10 min Go over the handout.

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Appendix B

The flashcards for Visualization Approaches

statue

tear

jewel

palace

leaf

hall

gold

misery

metal

princess

sword

orphan

ugly

starving

handle

beg

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sunlight

destroy

Appendix C

The corpus for story-telling approach

Once upon a time, there is an orphan living in the orphanage. The orphan’s name is

Mary. She always likes imagining if she can become a princess someday. One day, she fell

asleep when she is writing a story. She has a dream, and she dreams that she is having an

adventure in a forest. She walks alone in the forest alone, and there is an ugly statue in front of

her. Because of sunlight, there is a shining light below the statue. She wonders what the

shining light comes from, and she finds that the thing is covered by many leaves. She puts

away the leaves, and she sees a box. The box is hard to be opened even Mary holds the handle

of the box tightly, so she tries to destroy the box. When the box is opened, Mary is very

surprised because there are gold and jewels in the box. She thinks it is a perfect thing that she

has ever met because she won’t need to beg from people anymore when she is starving. These

jewels and gold are very precious for her, and she uses the gold to buy the best metal sword

for her boyfriend, John. John is a soldier, so he has to fight the enemy for his country. Because

he owns the best sword in the world, he gets win in the battle and he is rewarded a palace from

the king. Finally, he gets married to Mary, and they go to the palace through the hall. Mary is

touched, and she bursts into tears. From now on, they live happily ever after. Mary’s life is

changed, and it seems like princess’ life.