A Comparative Study On The Effect Of Visible And Invisible Hyperlink On College Students’ English Reading Process And Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

With the development of multimedia network technology, computer is more andmore widely applied in language teaching and learning. The topics of second languageacquisition assisted by new technology aroused increasing interest of researchers,teachers and curriculum designers. On the basis of reviewing previous studies, thepresent study adopted the way of experiment and interview to investigate the effect ofthe hypermedia signaling-modes, visible or invisible hyperlinks in hypertext, on collegestudents’ look up behavior, reading speed, reading comprehension and the effect on theirincidental vocabulary acquisition in English learning.In order to compare the effects of different hyperlink signaling-modes on languagelearning, there are three stages of the main experiment: reading and taking theimmediate test (including reading comprehension test and vocabulary test) with theinteractive multimedia computer program, delayed vocabulary test one week later andinterview the next day. The theoretical foundation of the experiment includes Schmidt’s(2001) Attention Theory, Craik and Lockhart’s (1972) theory of Depth of Processing,Multimedia Learning Cognitive Theory and the Multimedia Design Principles of Mayer(2003). The present study mainly focuses on the following four questions: Comparedwith invisible hyperlinks, do the visible hyperlinks significantly increase the students’clicking times? If the visible hyperlink increased the subjects’ clicking times, will itslow down their reading speed? Whether the visible hyperlinks will affect their readingcomprehension or not? Will visible hyperlinks affect the learners’ performance inreading comprehension? Do the visible hyperlinks benefit the students’ incidentalvocabulary acquisition in short-term and long-term retention?The participants of the present study were97non-English major freshmen (53boys and44girls) from three parallel classes of Chongqing University. They are in thesame English proficiency which was indicated in the English placement exam. Amongthem, one class was asked to find the target words and undertake the pilot study. Theremaining students were divided into two groups. One group read under visiblehyperlink condition and the other read under invisible hyperlink condition. All theparticipants were assigned to read four texts with certain difficulty. After the experiment,the collected raw data was analyzed by the statistic software SPSS17.0. What’s more,an interview was conducted to get supplementary evidence for the experimental results. With the statistical analysis, the results were gained as follows: when thehyperlinks were visible, the students largely increased their clicking times during thereading process; the readers’ reading speed didn’t slow down under visible hyperlinkcondition; visible hyperlinks did not impede the students’ comprehension of the passage;the visible hyperlinks promoted the students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition both inshort-term and long-term retention. Those results reflected the positive role of visiblehyperlinks which is in line with some of Mayer’s Multimedia Information DesignPrinciples.The significance of this study lies in the fact that in multimedia learningenvironment, compared with invisible hyperlink, visible hyperlink greatly attracts thelearners’ attention, which increases the interaction between learners and the readingpassages. This kind of interaction does not slow down the learners’ reading speed norimpact their reading comprehension. What’s more, it benefits the learners’ incidentalvocabulary acquisition both in short-term and long-term retention. It can be concludedthat visible hyperlink is beneficial to the college students’ English learning for visiblehyperlink playing a positive role in college students’ incidental vocabulary acquisitionwithout impacting their reading process. Therefore, the findings of the current studyprovides some illuminating insights for English reading course design, textbookdevelopment, and for English teachers to design courseware as well as for Englishlearners to choose helpful reading text in a multimedia learning environment.