engleski

Aesthetics and Vocabulary Learning: An Experiment

Aesthetics is a philosophical discipline dealing with the sensory cognition of the truth realised as beauty. Drawing on Kant’s argument that a beautiful work of art is created by a genius in the free use of her cognitive powers of imagination and understanding, the present study attempts to apply Kant’s aesthetic insights to foreign language vocabulary teaching and learning. A theoretical design of an aesthetic vocabulary strategy is presented. The additive effect of its utilisation as opposed to an imagery technique based on dual coding is tested in a sample of 35 young learners. The retention of an experimental item and the control items is measured using a simple word-picture matching test at three different occasions following the instruction. The third test is followed by a drawing stimulus test in which participants are asked to match their drawing of the referent of the experimental word to its written form. The results show that the experimental word scores are not significantly higher than the control word scores on the three individual tests. However, the scores for the experimental word on the drawing stimulus test are statistically significantly higher in comparison to the scores for all control words on all three tests. This indicates that the aesthetic strategy might have an advantage over the imagery strategy in the written form recognition and form-meaning association.

Aesthetics ; imagination ; imagery ; aesthetic strategy ; foreign language vocabulary learning

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