Effects of visual materials on the teaching of affixes

Given that short story serves as an effective tool in the EFL classroom, this study aims atinvestigating the impact of the use of short stories on vocabulary instruction through making acomparison between the two basic vocabulary learning strategies, dictionary use andcontextual guessing. For this purpose, a quasi-experimental design was used and the wordsused in the experiment were selected out of the short story ?The Cask of Amontillado? byEdgar Allan Poe. It was the 3rd year class of the ELT department at Çanakkale 18 MartUniversity to read this short story during the experiment. The class was divided into twogroups; contextual guessing group; the other dictionary group. Accordingly, for the purpose ofthe study, the participants took a test called ?Vocabulary Levels Test?, first devised by PaulNation (2000) to measure their vocabulary knowledge, so we could discover if learners withmore vocabulary items in their memory do better in contextual guessing and/or dictionary use.Further, the study also attempted to reveal what kind of factors actually hinder or facilitatelearning a word in context.To this end, the results of the experiment provided answers to the three research questionsbelow; 1) Which vocabulary learning technique is more effective in acquiring a vocabularyitem? Guessing or dictionary use? 2) What factors make it difficult for the students to learn aword through guessing and dictionary use? 3) Does acquiring a large vocabulary capacityhave any effect on the success in guessing from context and learning vocabulary throughdictionary use?KEY WORDS: Contextual Guessing, dictionary use, short story, vocabulary size