Generating Keyword Sentences : An investigation into student preferences

This paper reports on the results of an exploratory study into the vocabulary-strategy preferences of 2nd-year students at a national university in Japan. At the end of a 15-week English Communication course, 65 students completed a questionnaire related to the strategies they had used to remember ten words from the TOEIC Service List. A mnemonic technique known as the Keyword Method was by far the most popular, with 556 (85.5%) of the 650 possible responses. Rote repetition, the dominant paradigm in the Japanese educational system, only accounted for 12.5% (81) of the responses. Of the three possible Keyword Method generation techniques, experimenter-provided (276) and self-generated keyword sentences (243) were popular, but peer-generated keyword sentences (33) were found to be seldom used.