A Comparative Study Of Effects Of Text-picture And Text-audio Annotations On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition In Vocational School Reading Teaching

Vocabulary learning plays an important role in the process of language learning.Many studies demonstrate that vocabulary can be acquired incidentally throughreading, but the rate of vocabulary acquisition is low. To make up this shortcoming,many researchers point out that adding annotations in reading material can helplearners learn more words incidentally. In recent years, with the development ofmultimedia technology, many scholars focus on multimedia annotations, whichmean annotations can be added sound, picture and video so as to make annotationsmore diversified. At present, there are few studies on the effects of multimediaannotations on incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading in China,especially lacking of audio annotation studies. Most of the studies don’t takevocational school students with lower English proficiency as research subjects.Therefore, there is plenty of space for further studies in this area.In view of this, on the basis of dual-coding theory and cognitive theory ofmultimedia learning, the present study carries out an empirical study of the effects oftext-picture and text-audio annotations on incidental vocabulary acquisition invocational school reading teaching. The study tries to answer three questions:(1)Which is more effective on incidental vocabulary acquisition through readingbetween text-picture and text-audio annotations in the immediate vocabulary test?(2)What are the different effects of text-picture and text-audio annotations invocabulary retention in the delayed vocabulary test?(3) What is the effect oftext-picture and text-audio annotations on the performance of participants ofdifferent vocabulary size?The participants of this study were60students from Dezhou Normal School forPreschool Teachers, and they were divided into two groups: text-picture annotationgroup (T-P group) and text-audio annotation group (T-A group). Before theexperiment, the participants’ English scores of the recent final English examinationwere collected. And the One-Way ANOVA result indicated that the English language proficiency levels of the two groups were almost the same. In this study, multimediatechnology was applied to the reading material about355words with10target wordsadded text-picture annotation and text-audio annotation. The participants were nottold anything about the vocabulary test in advance. An immediate vocabulary testwas conducted among all the participants, when they finished the readingcomprehension. Two days after the immediate test，the author randomly chose fiveparticipants from each experimental group and made a face-to-face interview inorder to investigate participants’ opinions about the effectiveness of differentmultimedia annotation types. Two weeks later, all the participants took a delayedvocabulary test, which was similar to the immediate vocabulary test, but the order oftarget words was different. SPSS17.0was used to analyze the data collected fromthe two vocabulary tests. The results of the experiment showed that:(1) Text-pictureannotation group performed better than text-audio annotation group in immediatevocabulary test.(2) Although all the scores of delayed vocabulary test apparentlydecreased a lot, there was no obvious difference between text-picture group andtext-audio annotation group in vocabulary retention in the delayed test.(3)Participants with larger vocabulary could take better advantage of text-pictureannotation to learn more unknown words than those with smaller vocabulary.The present study not only presents the effect of text-picture and text-audioannotations on the performance of participants of different vocabulary size, but alsosupplies reference for teachers to change their traditional vocabulary teachingmethods, and to ask students to learn new words in the reading materials with thehelp of multimedia annotations. Besides, it offers some references to review the newwords immediately. Due to the limitation of small samples, short intervals betweenthe immediate and delayed tests and few types of multimedia annotations, this studyneeds to further develop so that it can be more representative and extensive.