Vocabulary Learning Through Picture-Viewing and Picture-Drawing on Tablets

Literature Review

Flashcards are frequently used by teachers for applying memory strategies; specifically, recurring pictures can stimulate learners to store vocabularies in the long-term memory of the brain. Regarding language learning, Oxford (1990) also proposed that verbal concepts can be converted into pictures and that vocabularies and paragraphs can be transformed into images. Moreover, students clearly experience more stimulation when teaching content combines pictures and texts than when it includes only pictures or texts (Morgan, 1982; Nicholson, 1998). In addition, Dual coding theory, proposed by Paivio (1991), suggests that the message processing of the human brain operates through a dual system and that referential connection enables a link to be established between the contents. Flashcards are portable and convenient and can be integrated with images of reified concepts to concretize the meaning of an English vocabulary, thus increasing the performance of learning.