AN ONLINE ARCHIVE OFDIGITAL KEYWORD METHOD IMAGES
Scott Sustenance
Muroran Institute of Technology
ABSTRACTThis paper begins by introducing a mnemonic technique forremembering vocabulary called the Keyword Method (Atkinson,1975). It then explains how modern technology was used toextend the method in a digital classroom. Finally, the reader isguidedthroughafree
onlinearchiveof
675
Digital-Keyword-Method images for 350 English words that caneither be incorporated into classes to create an environment of
linguistic play or recommended to students as a uniqueself-study tool.
INTRODUCTION
Acquiring vocabulary is a major component of the language-learning
process. Without the necessary words at one’s disposal, grammar or
pronunciation become close to irrelevant (Tight, 2010). A common methodtaught in the Japanese education system for studying vocabulary is rotelearning (Fewell, 2010). This technique entails writing words over and overagain in the hope that they will be consolidated into long-term memory.
Despite the popularity of rote learning in Japan, more than 50 studies haveshown that the Keyword Method (Atkinson, 1975) is a more effective way toremember vocabulary (Sagarra & Alba, 2006).
THE KEYWORD METHODThe Keyword Method is a mnemonic technique developed to help remember
L2 vocabulary. First, the student must think of a word (or words) in theirown language (L1) that sounds like the L2 word. This is known as the
keyword. In the second step, the keyword is connected to the L1 meaning by
creating a sentence that includes the keyword interacting with a translation.
A good way to imagine this is to think of a chain of three links. The link at
one end is the L2 word, and the link at the other end is the L1 translation.
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The middle link, which connects the two outer links, is the keyword (seeFigure 1).
The link between the L2 word and the keyword is known as the “acoustic
link”, because it is based purely on the sounds of the words. There does notneed to be any semantic relationship between the words in this link. An
example for an English-speaking learner of Japanese might be to use theword Hummer (the all-terrain vehicle) as a keyword for the Japanese word
浜 (hama), which means beach.
Figure 1. The Keyword Method

The connection between the keyword and the L1 translation is known as the“imagery link”. This time, the words are linked not by sound, but by asentence that creates an image in the mind’s eye of the two words
interacting with each other. To connect Hummer to beach in a memorable
way, you could imagine a person driving a Hummer in between people
relaxing on a beach (Sustenance, 2022). This is shown in Figure 2.
I have used this technique to remember Japanese vocabulary for many
years, and I thought it could be adapted to be an effective and engaging way
for Japanese students to study English vocabulary, so when I began working
at Kanda University of International Studies (KUIS), a private university
specializing in languages, in 2014, I started to experiment with using the
Keyword Method in the classroom.
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Figure 2. A Hummer on a Beach

THE DIGITAL KEYWORD METHODCoincidentally, 2014 was also the first year that all Freshman students at
KUIS were required to purchase iPads. This, combined with classrooms that
all had reliable wi-fi, allowed me the freedom to extend the original Keyword
Method, and inspired me to create what I call the Digital Keyword Method(Sustenance, 2018).
The Digital Keyword Method combined Google Docs, an image-manipulation
application called Pic Collage and Instagram (which in 2016 was a relatively
unknown social media application in Japan). In this updated version of the
Keyword Method, after creating the inherently multimodal keyword
sentences, students then transformed them into “modal ensembles”(Bezemer & Kress, 2008) that explicitly show the interaction between sound,text, and image.
In the original iteration of The Digital Keyword Method, students then posted
their creations to Instagram to create a virtual learning community. This
worked well in the week-to-week flow of a classroom where students could
search a unique hashtag to view all of the images for that week’s word list,
but there was no way for a student to search for all images that had beenposted for a certain word. Moreover, in 2019, presumably due to theincreased popularity of Instagram, problems such as having images
randomly deleted or being unavailable when searching the hashtags started
to occur. This resulted in a less-than satisfactory experience, so I decided tocreate a different type of online archive.
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AN ONLINE ARCHIVE
The Images
My first task was to sort through all of the images that had been created by
my students over the years. The archive currently has images for 350
English words (see Appendix A for a complete list). Of these words, 215 aredirectly taken from the TOEIC Service List (Browne & Culligan, 2016), and afurther 37 words, indicated by an asterisk, are variants of words found onthat list (for example, Comprehend instead of Comprehension). The TOEIC
Service List features heavily because students in the International
Communication department needed to score at least 650 on the TOEIC test
to graduate.
As I had used the Digital Keyword Method in the classroom for several years,
many of the words on the list had multiple images to choose from. In total,
there are 675 images on the website, meaning that, on average, there arejust under two images for each word. As can be seen in Table 1, the majorityof words have either one image (155 words) or two images (111 words). For
the remaining 84 words, there are three or more images to choose from.
More than two images were only included for a word when the keyword
sentences used were unique and the pictures were of high quality.
Table 1. The Number of Images for Each Word
Number of Images
per Word% of the Words
in the Archive

1

44.3

2

31.7

3

13.7

4

7.4

5

2.9

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The minimum requirement for inclusion in the archive was that the images
include an English word, a Japanese keyword sentence, and a picture (seeAppendix B). Even when those conditions were satisfied, several factors
influenced which images were chosen.
1. All of the sounds of the English word needed to be included in theJapanese keyword.
Despite the fact that Atkinson (1975) felt it was not necessary to have all
the sounds of the L2 word in the keyword, my experience, and the work of
Beaton, Gruneberg, Hyde, Shufflebottom, and Sykes (2005) lead me tobelieve otherwise. Atkinson felt that eye would be an appropriate keyword
for caballo (the Spanish word for horse, which sounds like “cob-eye-yo”), but
I have noticed that students often have trouble producing the word if the
keyword does not completely overlap the sounds of the L2 word. Therefore,
while a student might remember Atkinson’s image of “a horse kicking a gianteye” (p. 822), it is doubtful that the beginning and ending of the L2 word,
the “cob” and the “yo” would also be remembered. This could be remediedby adding a corn-on-the-cob and a yo-yo to the image.
2. There are no extra sounds in the Japanese keyword.
Another impediment to the effective use of the Keyword Method is theinclusion of sounds in the keyword that are not part of the L2 word. Any
extraneous sounds in the keyword tend to interfere with effective recall. For
example, when trying to think of a way to remember anonymous, 匿名の(tokumei no) in Japanese, one student came up with the following sentence;
匿名の人が穴に入ります。(tokumei no hito ga ana ni hairimasu)
This sentence, which evokes an image of an anonymous person going into ahole, includes all of the sounds of the L2 word (ana ni masu), highlighted,
but there are extra sounds (hairi) in between. Therefore, this is not an ideal
keyword sentence. By changing the sentence to one that has an anonymous
person placing a measuring box (presumably full of Japanese rice wine) into
the hole instead, these extraneous sounds disappear, and all of the soundsof the English word (ana ni masu) are now together.
匿名の人が穴に升を入れた。(tokumei no hito ga ana ni masu wo ireta)
3. The keyword sentence contains three elements.
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A keyword sentence consists of three different elements. In the case of aJapanese sentence for remembering an English word, the sentence must
include the Japanese meaning of the English word, a Japanese keyword, andany remaining Japanese text. In the example above, 匿名の is the meaningof the English word, 穴に升 (ana ni masu) is the Japanese keyword, and人が(hito ga) as well as を入れた (wo ireta) make up the remaining text. In all of
the images on the website, these three elements are in different colors to
help students distinguish the different parts of the sentence (see Appendix
B).
4. The picture helps to explain the sentence.
The sentences in isolation are often hard for anyone bar the creator tounderstand, so students were encouraged to create pictures that help to
explain the sentence. In cases where several images were created for thesame sentence, the image that included the most informative picture waschosen.
The Website
After organizing all of the images, I decided that a website I could be incharge of was the best way to archive the images. I had previously used
weebly.com to create free websites for use in my classes and had found it
extremely easy to use, so I decided to experiment with using the Weebly
platform to create an online archive of keyword images. The website that I
made can be found at: kwmjpn.weebly.com
The site, of course, can be viewed on either a computer, tablet or smart
phone, but there are slight navigational differences. The following
explanation is for the computer version. In the top right-hand corner, there
are four clickable page links. The first one, “HOME”, is the landing page. It
has the title, The Digital Keyword Method, and a short explanation in
Japanese. The next tab (キーワード法とは) gives a more in-depth explanationof the Keyword Method. There is an explanation of the Keyword Method andthe Digital Keyword Method in Japanese. The next two tabs (“英単語 A-M”
and “英単語 N-Z”) contain all of the images, which are arranged inalphabetical order. Each letter has its own page that can be accessed via adrop-down list. For example, as Figure 3 shows, if a student hovers the
cursor over the 英単語 A-M tab, all of the letters from A to M will beaccessible.
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Figure 3. The Images Are Arranged AlphabeticallyThen, if the student clicks on the link to the “A” page, a list of words thatbegin with “A”, arranged in alphabetical order, will appear, as shown in Figure
4. If the student is searching for a particular word, the first thing to do is tocheck if the desired word is in this list.
Figure 4. Words That Begin With “A”

If, for example, the student was looking for an image to remember the word
“Absurd”, finding the word on the list would encourage a move down the138
Sustenance, S. (2023). An online archive of digital keyword method images. Literacies andLanguage Education: Research and Practice, Spring 2023, 132-146. English Language
Institute, KUIS.

page to the Gallery (ギャラリー). The Gallery (see Figure 5) is located directly
under the list of words and includes thumbnails of all of the images for thewords on that page. Clicking on a thumbnail opens up a bigger, complete
version of the image. To view the images one-by-one, students can navigate
forwards or backwards by either using the left and right cursor keys or
clicking on the little arrow that appears when the cursor is hovering over theleft or right border of the image.
Figure 5. The Gallery

DISCUSSION
Although it was designed for self-study by Japanese students (which is why
all of the information on the site is in Japanese), it is possible to incorporate
the Keyword Method, and the images contained in this online archive into aclassroom. The development and implementation of the Digital Keyword
Method was the product of a teaching environment where I had six hours ofcontact time per cohort, per week, and every student possessed equivalenttechnology. However, this situation is no doubt the exception rather than therule in most Japanese universities. Regardless of the technology involved,
the ultimate aim of the technique is to allow the teacher to move from being
the “sage on the stage” to a position of “guide on the side” (King, 1993,p.30) as students work collaboratively to take control of their own learning.
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A Traditional Classroom
Since April 2021, I have been teaching at a university in Japan where, unlike
KUIS, students do not have iPads and there is no reliable wi-fi. I havedeveloped two ways of using the Keyword Method in my classes for two
different courses. The first course is a one-semester long sophomore-level
English communication class of non-English majors that only meets once a
week.
At the start of the semester, students are introduced to the Keyword Method,
and at the end of the third class, they are given a list of the vocabulary
words for the next class. This list includes eight English words, a Japanesetranslation for each one, and an approximation of the pronunciation written
in katakana. At the beginning of the next class, students are given time to
discuss their ideas in pairs or small groups, and then encouraged to share
their sentences with the class by writing them on the blackboard. The
classrooms include a projector, so the students are also shown example
images from the website for each word. This only takes about ten minutes ofclass time. In total, 40 words are studied during the 15-week semester(Sustenance, 2022). I have also been teaching a Freshman English course
where class cohorts rotate between five teachers over one semester,
meaning that each teacher has each cohort for three weeks.
In the first week, students are introduced to the Keyword Method and shownhow the Keyword Method can be used to remember English words by using
examples from the online archive. In the second week, students have achance to create their own sentences for 16 English words. They are given aworksheet that has four English words, a Japanese meaning for each word
and a katakana approximation of the pronunciation. Students are then given
time to work in pairs to make their own keyword sentences. An average of
one minute per word has proven to be a suitable amount of time. Therefore,
after four minutes, students pass the worksheet to the next pair and receive
four new words. After four rounds, they have seen all of the 16 words, but
not all of the sentences created by their classmates, so the four-minuterounds are reduced to 30 seconds in duration, and students are given achance to read all of the sentences created in the class. Then, they are given
time to add any good ideas to their original sheet. For homework, I havestudents input their favourite sentence into a Google Form, and then I
collate them into a list that is used in the next class to analyse and rank thesentences.

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Both of these group-oriented learning and experiential learning strategies fall
into the social constructivism approach to teaching. This student-centeredteaching style, developed by Vygotsky, is concerned with language and theinfluence of the social group on learning (Barry & King, 2004). Vygotsky
believed that understanding is developed through interaction and advocatedthe use of group work in a cooperative approach (Fetherston, 2006). The
activities described above came about as an attempt to replicate thereal-time collaborative function of Google Docs in an analog classroom.
A Digital Classroom
As mentioned previously, a Digital Classroom environment (iPads and wi-fi)
was the inspiration for extending the original Keyword Method into theDigital Keyword Method (Sustenance, 2018). Rather than using a blackboard
or paper, students were able to work together in real time to create keyword
sentences using Google Docs. Students were split into small groups andwere responsible for different words. They were required to find a suitable
Japanese translation, and then create a keyword sentence. If students
completed their task quickly, they were asked to help create keyword
sentences for the other words. Although the students are still ostensibly incontrol of the creative process, due to the omnipresent nature of Google
Docs, the teacher, depending on their Japanese ability, can engage inreal-time scaffolding.
An Online Classroom
Teaching online using software such as Zoom is, in many ways, similar to a
Digital Classroom environment. Once again, Google Docs can be employed
to allow students to work collaboratively to create keyword sentences. To
simulate the interaction between small groups in a Face-to-Face class, I haveused Breakout Rooms, and have found that the class as a whole tends to
produce more sentences than when I do not employ Breakout Rooms.
Perhaps students are more confident to share their ideas after discussing
them with their peers first.
At the end of the class, or the end of the semester, students can then be
introduced to the online archive and shown how to use it for their own
self-study.
CONCLUSION
This paper introduced an online archive of 675 Digital Keyword Method
images for 350 English words, and provided the teacher with some ideas of141
Sustenance, S. (2023). An online archive of digital keyword method images. Literacies andLanguage Education: Research and Practice, Spring 2023, 132-146. English Language
Institute, KUIS.

how to incorporate the Keyword Method into various types of classroom
environments. My experience using the Keyword Method in the classroom
has been an overwhelmingly positive one. The majority of students appear
to be attracted by the novelty of the process and seem to really enjoy theprocess of working together to think of the mnemonic sentences, reading theideas that their classmates create, and then looking at the images that I
present. Also, results of a pilot study using the Keyword Method in an analog
classroom yielded a statistically significant result (Sustenance, 2022)
suggesting that it may be an effective way to remember vocabulary.
Any negative feedback from students tends to fall into one or two categories,
both of which can be addressed by the online archive presented in thispaper. Even though, in the long term, using the Keyword Method can be lesstime consuming than rote learning (Piribabadi & Rahmany, 2014), students
sometimes report that they feel like they don’t have the necessary time tothink of keyword sentences for every word they encounter. The online
archive contains images for 350 English words, which should help
considerably reduce any time-related negativity. Students also sometimes
complain that, even though they might like the using Keyword Method, they
don’t have the necessary imagination to create memorable sentences. In aclassroom, this can be overcome by the collaborative nature of the activities,
but the same does not apply in a self-study situation. However, the online
archive has 675 keyword sentences for the students to choose from, whichshould help compensate for any perceived lack of imagination.
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Browne, C., & Culligan, B. (2016). The TOEIC Service List.
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learning methods with beginning learners of Spanish. The Modern Language
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APPENDIX A
An Alphabetical List of the English Words on the Website
Abide
AbsorbAbsurdAcclaimAccuracy
Activate
AdhereAdjacent
Agriculture
Aisle
Allocate
Ambitious
Amenity
Ample
Analyze
Angry
Annoy
Anonymous
Apology
Appendix
Appliance
Appreciate *Apprentice
ApproachArchitecture *Archive
Area
AspectAtom
AttainAuditor
Authority
AwesomeBankrupt
BanquetBehalf
Benefit *BetrayBeverage

Biography
Boast

Crane

Broad *

Criteria
Crow
Culinary
Cultivate
DeductDefectDefinite
Delicate
Demolish
DenyBrochure
BrowseBulletBury
CabinetCalculate *Cargo
Catharsis
CautionCeiling
Cheat
Chronic
Circulate
Clap
Classify
CoffinCombineCommitment
CommuteCompact
Compatible
CompileComplimentComprehend *Conform
Consequence
Considerate
Constitution
ConsumerContaminatedContradict
Contrary
ConveyCountless
Courtesy
Cower

Create *EncloseEnrollEntrepreneur
Envy
Equation
Erase
Ethical *Hideous
Hindrance
Honey
Horoscope
Humid *
Hunger *Evidence *Hydrangea
HygieneImmenseExclude *Immigrant *Excursion

Imperative

Desire *Exempt *Include *Desperate
DetachDeteriorate
Devastate

ExpireExportFacilitate
Fare
FastenFatigue
FaultyFiscalFixtureFlaw
Fluctuate
FluentForbidForumFranchise
Freight
Frustrate
Function
FurnishGarment
Generous
Genre
GobbleGravity
Gullible
HabitualHesitant

Inconsolable
Incur

Development *Diagnose
Diagram
Diploma
Discard
DisposeDistinguishDistribution
Dove
Drought
Duplicate
DurableDynamic
Eager
Economy *Efficient *Elegant
Eligible
Eliminate
Embed
Emphasis

Evacuate

Indicate *InfectInfer
Inference
InflateInsertIntegralIntently
Interfere
Interpret *Interrupt
InvoiceInvolve
Irrelevant
Irritate
Itinerary
JockeyKneel
Lamentable
Lawn
Legal
Lily
Lobby

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Lure
Mandatory
Mechanic
Mentor
Merge
Messy
MethodMinimize
Miserable
MisleadModify *Monument
MoraleNap
Nominate
Nook
NotifyNutrition
ObtainObviousOccasion
Occupant
Occur *
Official *Omit
Optimistic
Optional
Overdue
Overlap
Overview
Paradigm
PartialParticipate
Partition
PatentPedestrian
Penalize

Recipient
Recruit *Significant
Signify

ReferralSilent *Refine *Similar *Period *Reflex *Permanent *RefundRehearse
Reimburse
Reinforce
Relieve

Simultaneous
Sincerely
SmuggleSolve
Splurge
SpouseSquirrelPetition
Phenomenon
PhysicianPillow
PledgePluralPolishPollutePotential
Pottery
Predict *Prescribe
Prestigious
Principle
Probable
Proficient *Profit *ProhibitPublishPunctual
Punishment
Query
RebateRecession

Remove *Renovate
Repetition
Resemble
Residence
Response *ResumeRetreatRetrieve
ReunionRobustRubberRumor
Saga
Scholarship
Sculpture
Seize
SeldomSew
Shortage
SighStatistic *StatueSteer
Stimulus
Strategic​Stunning
Subsidize
Substance
Suburb
Sue
SuperbSurgeon
SurveySuspicious
Sway
Syllable
Symmetry
Syndrome
TacticTailorTechnician

Temporarily
Tempt
TenantTerrible
Terrific
Territory
Thud
Tragic
Trail
Transform
Transmit
Tremendous
UnloadUnreliable
UrgentVacancy
VacuumValid
Vase
VendorVenue
VerbalVerdict
VerifyVerticalVigilance
Voucher
Vowel
Wail
Waive
Warranty
Wrinkle145
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APPENDIX B
The Elements of a Digital Keyword Method Image

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