The Effects of Semantic Mapping on Vocabulary Memorizing

<strong>The</strong>re is another kind <strong>of</strong> semantic set which has to do with “stimulus-response pairs”, such as
accident-car and baby-mother. <strong>The</strong>se seem to be a great uniformity in people’s responses to
certain stimulus words which ought to be exploited to help students form more effective
association (Cater et al, 1989, p.71). Sokmen (1997) shared the same idea with them. In his
study, when being asked to give words they thought <strong>of</strong> when they heard the word
“unfaithfulness”, low intermediate ESL students generated 16 words or phrases. After clustering
words, which went together, they mapped the relationship between these words as
followed:
Feature 4 <strong>Semantic</strong> mapping for the word “unfaithfulness” (Sokmen, 1997, p.250)
Furthermore, Nation (2001) saw the interaction between the teacher and his learners when using
semantic mapping. He stated that semantic mapping involves the teacher and learners working
together to build up on the blackboard a visual framework <strong>of</strong> connections between ideas (p.129).
This technique helps students remember the stock <strong>of</strong> vocabulary they have learnt related to the
subjects.
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