The Impact of Keyword Technique on the Students’ Vocabulary Retention Ability in an EFL Class

Abstract

This paper makes an effort to show the effectiveness of keyword technique as a vocabulary retention technique. The study
was a one-group pretest-posttest experiment and aimed to investigate the effect of keyword technique on vocabularies retention ability of
40 Bangkok University students and explore their attitude towards the use of keyword technique. The instruments were the vocabulary
tests, and the questionnaire exploring attitude towards keyword technique. The pretest and posttest scores of the experimental group
were calculated by descriptive statistics and compared by using a dependent t-Test measure. It was found that students obtained higher
scores for the posttest than the pretest scores at the 0.05 level of significance. In addition, their attitude towards using the keyword
technique was at a high level. Moreover, the results from this study supported that using keyword technique helped the students store
and retrieve a new bunch of vocabularies, motivated them to learn English language and expanded their imagination and creativity.
Pedagogical implications into vocabulary retention technique were suggested.