Title – The development and evaluation of a visual image association method for efficient terminology teaching and learning: a teaching aid in the urban planning discipline

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One of the challenges in internationalised tertiary education is to teach terminology especially for students learning their major in English as second language. Students face challenges both in English and in their specific discipline during the learning process. Due to students’ immature English skills, the explanation for terminologies has to go through long process. The image association method, suggested in this research, has a theoretical background and been widely used in practice particularly in language education. Storytelling is a great method in language learning as seen in powerful ability to learn language in childhood. The primary purpose of this project is to develop a terminology learning process using image association and storytelling methods. Developed images will help students becoming familiar with new terminology in engaging ways. Images have been developed to well represent a core meaning of the terms. As these images are for the students who are in the transit period into a professional domain, this project is to stress a broad understanding of terminology instead of rigorous academic definition. After key terms in the urban planning and design field were identified, approximately 100 images were drawn for effective teaching in order to attract students’ attention and improve their memory. The materials were used to teach Year 1 non-English native speaking students who intended to major urban planning and design in an English spoken university. Overall, the students perceived the materials from this project positively. Among them, the most satisfied element was learning by the ‘image’ followed by story-telling and activities with the images