Middle School Students’ Experiences of Learning English Vocabulary Through Visual Materials: A Phenomenological Study

This study aims to describe middle school students’ experiences of learning English vocabulary through visual materials. Adopting a phenomenological design, one of the qualitative research methods, the study was conducted with twenty 8th-grade students at a public middle school in a rural district of Türkiye, all of whom had been taught four coursebook units with visually supported instruction. Data were collected through a semi-structured interview form developed by the researchers and analyzed following Moustakas’s (1994) phenomenological steps. The analysis yielded six themes under two research questions: students described their experiences through remembering through images, learning without rote memorization, and inferring meaning from visuals, and they attached to visually supported instruction the meanings of comprehending meaning, enjoyment and motivation, and imagined ideal ways of learning. The essence of the experience lay in a shift from memorization to recognition: words learned through images were experienced as scenes to be reseen rather than items to be retrieved. The findings offer teachers and material developers an experiential perspective of why visual support matters to learners.