Is Short Term Memory (STM) Modality and Gender Specific: A Study of Cell-Phone Assisted EFL Vocabulary Learning

摘要

The present research set out to investigate if dual modalities of verbal and visual presentations of vocabulary in a foreign language context are accommodated differently by STM as assessed through recognition and recall tests and also the relationship was examined for possible moderating effect of gender. The analysis indicated STM (high visual and high verbal) accommodates very well to delivery of materials with pictorial and/or written annotation(s), resulting in better learning on both recall and recognition tests. However, the results point to the insignificant relevance of STM to learners’ gender in L2 vocabulary compared to the verbal/visual processing orientations.