The Effect Of Modality On Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition

Modality refers to the information-processing channel that a learner uses to process the information (Mayer, 1997, pp. 1-2), such as audio and visual channels. Considerable amounts of studies related with modality have been carried out in general learning. Results from empirical studies are still rather inconclusive. Some researchers find modality effect, namely, enhanced learning occurs when information is presented through both visual and auditory channels. But some find redundancy effect. It occurs when presenting identical information through two channels and the elimination of one source of information is beneficial to learning. However, most of the existing studies took place in general learning and few have investigated how modality influences second language vocabulary learning, especially when comprehension is taken into account. As is clear, major differences exist between general learning and language learning. Language, for general learning, serves as the media and carrier of information. But for language learning, it is more of the object of learning. Therefore, the present study aims to investigate the effect of modality on second language vocabulary learning and comprehension. The research questions of the study are:1) Will different presentation modalities influence second language vocabulary acquisition?2) Will different presentation modalities influence second language comprehension?3) Will comprehension correlate to learner's vocabulary acquisition?100 sophomore English majors were recruited for the exploration of the effect from different input modalities (visual, audio, visual-audio) on second language vocabulary learning. Those subjects who were comparable regarding their pretreatment vocabulary size, language proficiency and target words knowledge were randomly divided into four groups. The three experimental groups were presented with three types of treatment respectively: 1) passage reading (visual); 2) passage listening (audio); and 3) simultaneous passage reading and listening (visual and audio). After the treatment, subjects were asked to recall what they have remembered from reading and/or listening in Chinese. Then a modified Vocabulary Knowledge Scale (Paribakht & Wesche, 2001) was used as the immediate vocabulary posttest. Two weeks later, all the subjects took a delayed posttest. The control group only took part in the pretest and two posttests, receiving no treatment. We found that:1) The three types of treatment all lead to vocabulary acquisition, but with different results. Specifically, subjects with visual presentation and visual plus audio presentation performed significantly better than the audio group and control group. The audio group outperformed the control group,but no significant difference occured. In the delayed posttest, the visual group outperformed the audio group significantly. Although no significant difference was found, The visual plus audio group performed better than the audio group. It also revealed that visual group developed more in vocabulary than the visual-audio group in the immediate as well as the delayed posttest.2) Presentation modality had an influence on comprehension. It showed that students who read the passage performed significantly better than the other two experimental groups; in addition, students under visual plus audio modality outperformed audio group significantly.3) Comprehension has a weak positive correlation with vocabulary learning in the immediate posttest and no significant correlation in the delayed posttest.From the study, we can see that modality exerts influence on vocabulary learning as well as comprehension. Visual modality enjoys superiority over audio or visual plus audio modalities. And visual plus audio modality turns to be effective than audio-alone modality. In addition, it is revealed that comprehension has a weak correlation to acquisition.