Individuality in Higher Education: the Use of the Multiple-Mnemonic Method to Enhance ESP Students' Vocabulary Development (Depth and Size) and Retention

vocabulary learning is considered to be the most comprehensive and the most difficult part oflanguage learning for all the students especially for esp students. these students complain thatvocabulary items are too many and are easily forgotten after they are learned. mnemonicdevices, a group of mental strategies, are developed to facilitate vocabulary learning andretention for such students. these students, however, have varied needs and interests and ifvocabulary teaching and learning are planned to be effective and enjoyable, various methodsand strategies must be employed. to this end, the multiple-mnemonic method was developedand studied. two intact groups of esp students participated in this study. in the experimentalgroup the multiple-mnemonic method was used while in the control group the vocabularyitems were just taught and reviewed. the results of the study showed that the multiplemnemonicmethod group significantly performed better than the control group in terms ofvocabulary development and retention. evks was also further evaluated and used in this studyas a measure of vocabulary size and vocabulary depth.