The effects of multiple intelligences activities on vocabulary achievement and attitudes of learners of English

The acquisition of vocabulary is one of the main tasks in second language classrooms. Many language teachers are aware of the necessity of making vocabulary a main part of their teaching. The growing importance of vocabulary teaching in English Language Teaching (ELT) classrooms and the problems encountered in this process shaped this dissertation. The central aim of the researcher was to offer a better way to teach vocabulary in ELT classes using Gardner?s Multiple Intelligences Theory (MIT), which suggests there are many ways to be intelligent and an individual has several of them. Therefore, the effects of multiple intelligences (MI) activities on vocabulary achievement and retention of the learnt items constituted the keystone of this study. Whether MI activities affect students? attitudes towards English was the second question this research intended to answer. This study also designated the intelligence profiles of the students in the sample group.In order to test the effect of MI activities on achievement, retention and attitudes, an experimental study with a pre, post-test and delayed post test was conducted. The subjects of the study were 10th grade students of Söke Cumhuriyet Anatolian High School in the Spring Term of 2007-2008 academic years. These students had taken 10 hours of English lessons per week in the previous academic year. In the year the study was carried out, they had 4 hours of English lessons in a week. At the time of this educational treatment they were in the beginnings of the second semester. The selection of the participants was determined on the basis of a multiple-choice recognition test of the chosen target linguistic component. The students who showed any sign of knowledge of the target vocabulary items would have been excluded from the study. However, since none of the students scored over 50 in the recognition test, the number of the students in the sample remained 56. These students were divided into two groups in order to form the control and experimental groups. Thus, the sample of this research was composed of the sophomores of two Turkish-Mathematics department classes in Söke Cumhuriyet Anatolian High School. The control and experimental groups were assigned randomly. The age of the subjects ranged between 15 and 16. In the experimental group MI activities were used in presentation, practice and production. On the other hand, in the control group traditional method was implemented and controlled activities in presentation and practice, and freer activities in production were used to teach target vocabulary items. Both of the groups had an eight-week-treatment period.The outcome of the experiment reveals that MI activities have a significant positive effect on vocabulary achievement. However, MI activities do not have significantly more positive effects on the retention of the vocabulary items. The second primary research question is related to whether the students? attitudes towards English vary significantly in terms of the activities in the control and experimental groups. The analyses indicate in both groups there is a decrease in the students? attitudes towards English which is not statistically significant. Finally, it is found out that the most dominant intelligence type of the students in the sample group is verbal-linguistic. The second dominant type in both experimental and control groups is logical-mathematical intelligence. The lowest mean score in the multiple intelligence inventory belongs to interpersonal intelligence in both groups.