The Effects Of Multimedia Annotation Modes On EFL Vocabulary Learning

With the development of multimedia-computer technology, many scholars make efforts to investigate the effectiveness of multimedia-computer assisted language learning. One aspect of second language teaching via multimedia that has received attention over the past few years is multimedia-computer assisted vocabulary acquisition, in which the impact of multimedia annotations through different modalities has aroused people's interests. Despite years of English study, most college students still find that their vocabulary size is quite small and that to effectively acquire vocabulary incidentally during the reading or listening process is still an urgent problem. Therefore, it is of great importance to effectively acquire vocabulary incidentally in the cognitive process of reading or listening. However, from the related literature review the researcher finds that the best way to improve vocabulary learning is not conclusive. What is more, there are few comparative studies on the effectiveness of multimedia annotations on EFL vocabulary learning, especially for college EFL learners. Based on this research gap, the present study investigates efficacy of different multimedia annotation modes, i.e. text alone (NONE), text coupled with associated audio (TA), text coupled with associated pictures (TP), and audio coupled with associated pictures (AP), on EFL vocabulary learning. The objectives of the study are: 1) to see whether learning with annotations results in better gains of vocabulary knowledge than that without annotations; 2) to find out what type of multimedia annotation mode is more beneficial to English vocabulary learning; 3) to find its pedagogical implications to vocabulary teaching practice.The study last for six weeks. In order to assess the efficacy of each mode, a pre-test, the reading program, the questionnaire, interview and posttests were designed and administrated to the participants. The participants, 155 EFL sophomores, came from five parallel classes of non-English majors. The five classes were randomly divided into five groups (NONE, T, TA, TP, AP) respectively with the NONE group as the control group while the left four (T, TA, TP, AP) as the experimental groups. The learning material was incorporated into the multimedia program which was comprised of 10 highlighted words, and the experimental groups had access to different multimedia annotation modes respectively while the control group had no access to annotations. All the participants were asked to read the text on the screen and understand it so that they could take a comprehension test after reading it. After the completion of the task, all the participants were tested on meaning recall of the target words out of expectation, and after two weeks they had the delayed test again without notice. Results were analyzed using analysis of variance procedures by the statistic software SPSS 13.0 for windows.Results of the study indicate that the experimental groups outperform the control group in both the immediate test and long-term retention test, which confirms the finding of previous studies, i.e. annotations can facilitate vocabulary learning. As for the comparison of the efficacy of the four types of annotations, the results show that AP group outperforms T, TA, TP groups. One possible explanation is that the cognitive process of AP annotation mode is a dual-coding processing. The verbal explanation and pictorial illustration work together to make full use of the capability of both auditory and visual channels, consequently enhancing short-term vocabulary retention and long-term retention as well. Furthermore, transient, time-based nature of audio information makes students more concentrated in searching for definitions and descriptions of target words annotated by pictures. The involvement load caused by deep processing strengthens students'understanding and memorization of the target words. Instead, in TP annotation mode, both text and picture are of visual modality, and two different information processing procedures in single channel cause cognitive overloading.The positive impact of multimedia annotations verified in this study indicate that courseware designers should pay more attention to optimizing combination of multimedia annotation in accordance with appropriate modalities, thus, reading comprehension can be improved and vocabulary acquisition enhanced. The results of this study give pedagogical implications for EFL teachers in preparing their multimedia teaching materials.