Teaching Vocabulary to Turkish EFL Learners via the Cartoons of Three English Classics

Abstract

The purpose of that study is to investigate the implementation of vocabulary teaching through cartoons on students who have read texts in the format of comic strips and the ones reading without the support of any illustrations. This paper also aims to reveal the effects of students' age and gender during vocabulary teaching process. Cartoon extracts of three classics from English literature, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, Romeo & Juliet by William Shakespeare, and Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson have been utilized for the experiment. On the one hand, 47 Turkish students taking English courses in Research and Application Centre at a state university in Turkey were in the experimental group, and they were exposed to cartoons. On the other hand, randomly drawn 20 took part in the control group who read stories in plain text formats. According to the results of this quasiexperimental research, a significant difference could not be detected between two groups. Nevertheless, the experimental group was more successful in vocabulary achievement rates than the control group. Moreover, the results indicated the fact that female students were more successful than the males in word knowledge, and 20-29 year-old students were distinguished to be better than the other age groups.