A REAPPRAISAL OF THE ROLE OF MEMORIZATION AS A COGNITIVE STRATEGY IN VOCABULARY LEARNING

Vocabulary is a core component of language proficiency and provides much of the basis for how well learners communicate with each other. Clearly, learning and maintaining a large storage of vocabulary is a crucial and demanding job, and L2 teachers always ask which strategies and tasks are more effective in helping students learn as many words as they can in the most economical way. During the past 30 years there has been strong opposition against using memorization as a language learning strategy in favor of more communicative, constructivist, and thought-oriented strategies. The advocates of such a position argue that memorization is an outdated, shallow, and counterproductive educational practice and does not lead to deep learning. Therefore, a large number of other strategies which demand a deeper level of data processing have been introduced and implemented in order to enrich L2 learners' word knowledge.
Given the inconclusive findings of studies exploring the role of memorization in vocabulary acquisition in comparison to other strategies, this study investigated the effects of two cognitive strategies, rote memorization of word lists containing an English word along with its synonym and semantic mapping, in helping L2 learners improve their vocabulary storage. Thirty eight two female Iranian university students at the intermediate level participated in this study. In order to check the homogeneity of the participants in terms of English language proficiency, they were given a standardized general proficiency test. The students whose scores fell between one standard deviation above and below the mean were selected and then divided into two experimental groups each employing one of the target strategies of this study for vocabulary acquisition. After the four-month treatment period, a multiple-choice vocabulary posttest was given to the members of both groups to measure their progress in this area. The statistical analysis of the results revealed that the difference between their posttest mean scores was not statistically significant. Therefore, it was concluded that, in spite of the energy and time devoted to preparing the semantic maps for each unit of instruction, this technique was not superior to rote memorization in helping the students to expand their word knowledge, thus casting doubt on the attacks targeted at rote memorization as a useful strategy for vocabulary acquisition.