The effectiveness of visual materials in teaching vocabulary to deaf students of EFL

The aim of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of using visual materials in teaching vocabulary to deaf students of EFL. For this purpose, 80 deaf students from a state special education vocational high school in Turkey took part in the study. All of these students have English classes for the first time in their lives and they are at the starter level of English, thus pre-test for their English proficiency was not applied. The students were randomly divided into two groups to form the experimental and the control groups. Students were taught 10 vocabulary items per week, and totally 50 target vocabulary items were taught during the whole study. The vocabulary items were taught with visual materials together with the sign language to the experimental group, and the control group was not introduced with any visual items while teaching these words, they were just taught with the help of sign language instruction. Immediate post-test was applied to each group after the treatment to measure the impact on learning. To test long term retention, delayed post-test was given to the groups six weeks after the immediate tests. Independent Samples and Paired Samples T-test calculations were utilized with the results of the immediate and delayed post-tests to investigate the effectiveness of visual materials. According to the results of the study, visual materials were found to be more effective than using only the sign language which does not include any visual materials in teaching vocabulary to deaf learners of EFL