Incidental Vocabulary Learning Through Audio-Assisted Comic: An Experimental Study on Vocabulary Gain

Abstract

Comic start to gain popularity and many people start to read it for different purpose. In education field, researchers tried to see the potential of comic in improving student’s ability in many areas. This study aimed to investigate the effect of using comic to gain incidental vocabulary, specifically in at-home situation where people usually read a comic. A pretest-posttest design was administered to 34 junior high school students in Thailand. A VKS (Vocabulary Knowledge Scale) was used to assess their result about 15 target vocabularies. The control group only read the comic while the experimental group read and listen to the comic. The result proved that the students who learned incidental vocabulary through reading and listening obtained better score than the students who were only reading. The students who read and listen obtained mean score of 33.94 while the students who only read obtained 25.06 during the post-test. It can be concluded that students who learned incidental vocabulary learning through comic by reading and listening gained better vocabulary than those who did not.