Abstract
This research explored the effects of three types of multimedia glosses on the reading comprehension of learners in an EFL context. From among the three experimental groups under study, one received treatment on five academic reading passages through picto-textual glosses where both textual definitions and relevant images of words popped up, thus helping learners surmise the meanings of the keywords. In a similar vein, the other two groups received treatment on the same passages, but used either pictorial or textual glosses where pertinent pictures or textual definitions of the keywords appeared on the screen. The experiment showed that the picto-textual-gloss group outperformed the other two groups, and that the pictorial-gloss group outperformed the textual-gloss group. The study thus underpinned Paivio’s (1971, 1986, 1991) Dual Coding Theory, arguing that when information is available in two modes of presentation, it becomes more elaborate and thus more memorable. When applied to reading comprehension, the idea suggests that the combination of textual and visual definitions might help learners better decipher the meanings of keywords in reading passages, and hence arrive at an even deeper comprehension of the texts.
Highlights
There is a general consensus that multimedia courseware is potentially useful for second language reading, as a given text can be rendered comprehensible to L2 learners through glosses or annotations (Davis, 1989; Martinez-Lage, 1997; Roby, 1999)
Chun & Plass (1996), for instance, examined the effects of multimedia glosses on reading comprehension. They conducted three studies involving 160 students of German using CyberBuch, a multimedia software application. The results of these experiments revealed that multimedia glosses significantly aided in comprehension, and that vocabulary annotations consisting of both visual and verbal definitions were more effective than the ones providing textual definitions alone
Implications This research favored the use of the picto-textual gloss as the most effective type of vocabulary annotation aiding in reading comprehension
Summary
There is a general consensus that multimedia courseware is potentially useful for second language reading, as a given text can be rendered comprehensible to L2 learners through glosses or annotations (Davis, 1989; Martinez-Lage, 1997; Roby, 1999). Chun & Plass (1996), for instance, examined the effects of multimedia glosses on reading comprehension They conducted three studies involving 160 students of German using CyberBuch, a multimedia software application. The results of these experiments revealed that multimedia glosses significantly aided in comprehension, and that vocabulary annotations consisting of both visual and verbal definitions were more effective than the ones providing textual definitions alone. In Ko’s (2005) study, in a similar vein, 106 undergraduates at a university in Korea were asked to go through the reading passages under one of three conditions: no gloss, Korean gloss, and English gloss. The experiment revealed that the hypermedia environment drawing on glosses significantly improved comprehension of the reading text
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