Machine summary:
"The acknowledgment of the significance of vocabulary by second/foreign language acquisition (SLA) researchers has resulted in an escalating enthusiasm centered on investigating viable methods of helping learners with the tedious task of learning new words.
Bleckley (2006) reports that three different types of vocabulary instruction have been tested through the history of English language teaching: definition-based instruction, consisting of a list of words that learners look up and write the definitions down; context-as-a-clue instruction, through which meanings of the target words are inferred from the adjacent material; and the semantic mapping approach, in which new words are associated with other words which are already present in the learners’ mental lexicon.
The second objective that the study sought was to unearth a potential match – if any – between any groups of learners (based on perceptual modality) and employing semantic maps in vocabulary instruction.
In other words, it attempted to discover which learner groups (auditory, visual, kinesthetic, or multisensory) benefit more from employing semantic maps in vocabulary learning tasks.
As explained earlier, 196 learners whose scores fell one standard deviation above and below the mean were selected as the participants of the study, while the excluded 68 attended the instructional sessions for the experimental or the control groups and were given the tests and allowed to participate in classroom activities just like the 196 participants in order not to impede the regular language learning process, and given the administrative regulations in place by the language schools."