THE MINISTRY OF EDUCATION
HO CHI MINH CITY OPEN UNIVERSITY
...............................................

VO KIM TRAN

THE USE OF FLASHCARDS IN TEACHING VOCABULARY FOR YOUNG
LEARNERS AT DOAN HUNG INFORMATICS & FOREIGN LANGUAGE SCHOOL

Major: TEACHING ENGLISH TO SPEAKERS OF OTHER LANGUAGES
Major code: TESOL 739

MASTER OF ARTS IN TESOL
Supervisor: Dr. NGUYEN DINH THU

Ho Chi Minh City, 2016


STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP
I certify that this thesis entitled “The Use of Flashcards in Teaching Vocabulary for Young
Learners at Doan Hung Informatics & Foreign Language School” is my own work.

Except where reference is made in the text of the thesis, this thesis contains no material
published elsewhere or extracted in whole or in part from a thesis by which I have qualified
for or been awarded another degree or diploma.
No other person’s work has been used without due acknowledgement in the main text of the
thesis.

This thesis has not been submitted for the award of any degree or diploma in any other
tertiary situation.



ABSTRACT
Young children mainly learn vocabulary in their English learning. Therefore, teachers
often invest lots of time to find out useful teaching techniques and teaching aids which can
help them be successful in teaching young learners vocabulary. This study aims to investigate
the effectiveness of using flashcards to teach young learners vocabulary. This paper examines
whether flashcards can give young children motivation in learning new words and whether
they can enhance their vocabulary retention. The research also investigates the teachers’
perception of using flashcards to teach young learners vocabulary. 34 young learners who are
learning English at Doan Hung Informatics & Foreign Language School participated in this
study during 3 weeks. Both qualitative data, including classroom video recordings, teaching
journals, and teachers interviewing, and quantitative data, including pre-test and post-test
scores were analysed to answer the two research questions. The findings of this research
showed that most of the participants in the experimental group were highly motivated to learn
the new words. Besides, the participants in this group also improved their vocabulary
retention. Finally, the teacher interviewees expressed their positive attitudes towards using
flashcards to teach young learners vocabulary. Some suggestions for further research in using
flashcards for teaching young learners vocabulary are also suggested.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

pages
STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP .......................................................................................... i
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT ......................................................................................................... ii
ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................... iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS .......................................................................................................... iv
LIST OF TABLES .................................................................................................................... vii

3.2. Instruments ................................................................................................................... 28
3.3. Procedures .................................................................................................................... 29
CHAPTER 4. FINDINGS AND RESULTS ........................................................................... 38
4.1. Response to research question 1 .................................................................................. 38
4.2. Response to research question 2 ................................................................................... 44
4.3. Response to research question 3 ................................................................................... 49
4.3.1. The first interviewee’s response ........................................................................... 49
4.3.2. The second interviewee’s response ...................................................................... 51
4.3.3. The third interviewee’s response .......................................................................... 52
CHAPTER 5. DISCUSSION THE FINDINGS ..................................................................... 54
5.1. Flashcards gave the young learners motivation ............................................................ 54
5.2. Flashcards enhance the young learners’ vocabulary retention ..................................... 55
5.3. The interviewed teachers’ agreement with using flashcards to teach young learners
vocabulary. ............................................................................................................................... 56
CHAPTER 6. CONCLUSION, IMPLICATIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS .......... 58
6.1.

Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 59

6.2.

Pedagogical implications .......................................................................................... 60

6.3.

Recommendations .................................................................................................... 61

REFERENCES ......................................................................................................................... 63
APPENDICES........................................................................................................................... 69


Vocabulary retention

CG:

Control group

EG:

Experimental group

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CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
This chapter mentions the general background of the research. It also
talks about the importance of vocabulary in language teaching and learning. In
addition, the chapter also raises the problem in teaching vocabulary to young
learners at Doan Hung Informatics & Foreign Language school. Then it gives
some issues such as aims of the research, the research questions, the significance
of the research.
1.1.

Background of the research

It is the fact that vocabulary itself shows its important position in English
language teaching and learning. Shen (2003) said that “vocabulary has got its
central and essential status in discussion about learning a language”. There are
many highlighted studies on teaching vocabulary. Nation (2001) pointed out the
goals of vocabulary in language learning, the use of vocabulary in specific
learning skills as well as the strategies for teaching and learning vocabulary.

have got in touch with lots of new vocabularies during English courses. It is
clear to see that in most English textbooks of children, vocabulary is introduced
first, and then there are some other tasks for further practicing such as sentence
samples, conversations. Dekeyser (2007) said that learning vocabulary is not just
about its meaning but the other collocations, association, the related grammatical
rules,etc (as cited in Ur, 2012). In addition to this, children learn vocabulary
better than grammar as they may see grammar rules are difficult to remember
(Demircioglu, 2010). Although young learners are used to learning simple
words, it is such a difficult task for teachers to teach them vocabulary with the
purpose of giving them interest and engagement in lessons, and improving their
retention of what they have just learned.

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Firstly, it is hard for teachers to ask children to sit down and learn words
seriously because children love action. A child will be bored with staying at the
same place to learn words. The reason for explaining is that children have a short
span of concentration in the classroom; only after a short time of the lesson,
about fifteen or twenty minutes, they tend to talk in private with friends, draw
pictures, even eat or sleep in class. Additionally, according to Cameroon (2001),
the more active the students are, the easier they may lose their learning attention.
Moreover, the students are easy to get bored. They will show their boredom if
teachers give them so many words and force them to learn. Therefore, it is
essential for teachers to give young children interests in learning new
vocabulary. It is said that an effective language learning environment is in a free
anxiety atmosphere where young learners can show their passion to come to
class. If people do something with passion, they will get success because they
have good encouragement to do.
Secondly, helping young learners remember new vocabulary is not a less

with. Therefore, teacher should design funny tasks but must keep the learning
potential as well as keep the class being under control.
Combination of studying with relaxing is not such an easy duty. The
younger the learners are, the more interesting activities in class are needed
because young children love learning through playing but the activities must be
well selected to be directly connected with the content of lesson and serve to get
the lesson’s target. Research in the fields found out the effectiveness of teaching
materials on teaching young learners vocabulary. It is very necessary to use a
variety of techniques to get better teaching results. In specific, flashcards are
considered as one of the most effective teaching aids which support teachers in
teaching young learners vocabulary effectively in term of using flashcards to
design tasks, using flashcards to attract young children’ attention.
1.2.

Statement of the problem

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In Vietnamese teaching context, English has proved its popularity as there
is a tendency that more and more people who have needs of learning English.
Not only adults working in companies or students studying at universities,
colleges, high schools have the need of learning English, but also most parents
take their children at the age of primary to foreign language school to prepare
them a better English background for future. In addition to this, the age to start
learning English is lower and lower. English is not only taught at primary
schools but also be widely taught even in the nursery schools.
It is believed that children only learn simple vocabulary in their language
learning process. As a result, teaching English to them is easier than adult
learners. Ur (2012), however, pointed out that each individual students have

At Doan Hung Informatics & Foreign Language School, a school mainly
teaches English for students at primary school level, it is also in the same
situation that there are not many teachers who use flashcards in their lessons
even though flashcards have showed its effectiveness in research of English
language teaching and learning. Even some of the teachers who are teaching
young children’ classes at the school sometimes use flashcards. It is not difficult
to realize young children’ tiredness in classrooms through the camera system of
the school. They are sometimes lazy to volunteer to answer teachers’ questions.
They seem to be not motivated well if teachers give lessons in a way with their
textbook. In detail, teachers just show meanings of new words to students, then
ask them to repeat, give them time to remember the words, and ask them to learn
by heart at home, etc. After that, students can be checked by asking to write the
words in the next class.
Therefore, it is time to think about how to give young learners motivation
in their vocabulary learning, how to offer them chance to improve their

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vocabulary retention. Flashcard has showed their effectiveness on language
teaching and learning so it is a question that whether flashcards are suitable for
applying to teach young children vocabulary at Doan Hung.
1.3.

Aims of the research

This research is conducted to investigate that whether the flashcards give
any effectiveness on the young learners’ vocabulary learning at Doan Hung.
Specifically, the study aims to:
(1) find out whether flashcards can motivate young learners in learning

teaching results. Once teacher realize the use of flashcards in classrooms is not
much complex like it has been thought, teachers can use them more often.
Besides, the study introduces teachers at Doan Hung multi activities which can
be easy and time-saving to design. As a result, they can be familiar to use
flashcards in teaching more than as usual. Additionally, once the young children
are learning in a happy and comfortable mood, they may get knowledge easier,
which contributes to upgrade their vocabulary retention.
1.6.

Limitations of the research

Everything has its own limitations and so does this study. First, the
participants of this research are limited in Doan Hung environment so the result
of the study will be difficult to be valuable in other schools. Second, the
participant teachers for the teacher interview are limited in the number of three
teachers ,who are having experiences in teaching young childrens at Doan Hung.
It might be better if all of the teachers were interviewed. Moreover, due to the
lack of professional equipments, the video recordings, which are used for
analysing the young learners motivation during both the experimental teaching
and the normal teaching do not have good quality with the existence of some
outside noise. In addition, as the researcher herself recorded the videos, so the
recorder sometimes stopped working in a short time but she did not recognize.

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1.7.

Overview of the research


cannot be in writing classes which will help him enhance his writing skill.
Harmer (2007b) put it that students have various reasons to learn English. Some
of them take an English course due to the requirement of the curriculum at their
schools.

Others

learn

English

for

specific

purposes,

especially

for

communication. There is also another group of students who learn English
because they think it is useful for their future. Harmer (2007b) mentioned that
linguists have divided English learners into groups such as young children,
adolescences, young adults or adults.
At different ages, learners may have very different language learning
characteristics. Additionally, Harmer (2007a) emphasized that at different ages,
learners have different needs in language learning. Adult learners usually have a
clearer and greater target of learning languages, for instance, the ability of
making good communication, improvement in reading comprehension or writing

kindergarten classes. In fact, nowadays, the age to start learning English is lower
and lower due to the belief that “the younger you start, the more chance you

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have of making the learning successful”, according to Scrivener (2011).
Actually, according to him, the sooner a child is taken to a language class, the
more chances he will be successful in that language learning. Early starting to
learn a language will help children acquire the new language better because they
have more years to experience and develop the language at school. The linguist
also gave a very specific example that children who are immigrants to English
speaking countries can use English as their mother tongue. They are called
bilingual children. Although many researches in evaluation of the effectiveness
of teaching young learners English at the early age of life, some researchers gave
the concern of the disadvantages of this phenomena (Thornbury, 2006).
2.2.

Young children vocabulary acquisition

Researches into vocabulary learning have particularly discussed the
vocabulary acquisition. Carter (2001) investigated the natural process of how a
word can be learned, which would help teachers to have flexible methods to
teach vocabulary. He pointed out the vocabulary learning acquisition, explicitly
and implicitly. Explicit or direct process means that teachers present vocabulary
to students by means of translation new words into their mother tongue, by
teaching techniques and materials which help to express the meanings of words.
Implicit or indirect process means that students learn new words through
context. In other words, students read a text, then, find out what new
vocabularies that they do not understand meanings and then students will guess

(1990) argued that second language learners may have got difficulties in
incidental acquisition due to their limited English vocabulary proficiency and he
suggested combining vocabulary instruction in the four skills listening, speaking,
reading and writing (as cited in Richards & Renandya, 2002).

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Although extensive reading benefit learners in vocabulary learning, it is
considered as a difficult strategy, according to Hunt & Beglar. They pointed out
that it is more effective to apply this strategy to learners who have high
vocabulary prociency rather than the low ones. A more simple strategy using
context to learn new words is called indendent strategy development. In this
strategy, the procedure for guessing words’ meanings from context will begin
with deciding which words are important throughout the text, and then
identifying them from five-step procedure of Nation & Coady model (as cited in
Richards & Renandya, 2002).
Ur (2012) showed the difference between children’ and adults’
vocabulary learning acquisition. She acknowledged that adults learn vocabulary
effectively through explicit process, in contrast, children learn best through
implicit process. Children tend to be fond of “ imitating, memorizing, acquiring
intuititively” through repeated actions and production in enjoyable or interesting
activities. Ur (2012), however, pointed out that this learning process takes a long
time to be effective so adult learners do not like that process. She said that “ the
older a student gets, the more explicit learning process he or she will use”.
Adult learners have real needs of understanding reading comprehension, being
more fluent in speaking or enhancing the other language skills and proficiency
through vocabulary. In contrast, children have no clear purpose of learning
vocabulary, they just simply learn to know a range of words to speak them out.
This is the reason why adult learners usually choose explicit learning process

Thornbury (2006) provided the three special characteristics of young
learners which can distinguish them from adult learners, in terms of cognitive,
affective and social dimensions. The first characteristic links to children’
limitation of their real life knowledge, developing memory, inability to conduct
abstract concepts, or difficulty in short span of attention. The second

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characteristic includes the need of encouragement and support while the rest
character is their lack of social skills and dependency on their teacher.
Brown (1994) suggested five categories of young children which may
offer teachers some good approaches to teach them better. Teachers should note
the following five items: intellectual development, attention span, sensory input,
affective factors, and authentic, meaningful language. In general, the five above
factors will directly affect young learners’ learning language.
2.3.1. Intellectual
Young learners are believed to acquire to a language faster and learn
better than any other groups of learners. The critical period hypothesis (CPH)
agreed the idea but they also added that the young children can acquire
knowledge “quickly” and “naturally” just at a certain age and this capability may
lose gradually (cited in Ur, 2012). However, she pointed out that CPH research
was conducted in first language school but in second language learning or
foreign language learning, that idea may not be true anymore as there were
proofs that the older learners sometimes had better language acquisition than the
younger ones, which depends on the concrete learning context and learners’
abilities as well (Harmer, 2007a). Moreover, adult learners may get a better word
retention than young ones thanks to their intellect. It does not prove that young
learners are lack of intelligence but just because of their age limitation. They can
be excellent language students but just being compared to children at the same

2.3.3. Span of attention

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