The Effect Of Annotation On Vocabulary Acquisition And Reading Comprehension

Vocabulary acquisition is of vital importance to second language acquisition. Incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading is regarded as one of the most important way for vocabulary acquisition. However, the factors that affect the process of incidental vocabulary acquisition are various. For example, the vocabulary size of learners, reading ability, etc.Researchers have made great efforts to find out the factors that effect the incidental vocabulary acquisition and glossing is one of them. Glossing is not only helpful for reading comprehension but also important for incidental vocabulary acquisition and vocabulary retention. Recently,researches about glossing have transferred from whether it is helpful to which kind of glossing is better. However, the ways of glossing are so many that there are still lots of unsolved questions.This study aims to investigate the effects of different ways of gloss on reading comprehension,incidental vocabulary acquisition and retention. The gloss position(pre-text,margin,within-text)and textual enhancement(bold,without bold) are two major factors in this study.119 sophomores of English major took part in the experiment, including a reading comprehension test, a vocabulary text, a delayed vocabulary text and an interview. The results show that(1) different gloss types have different effects on incidental vocabulary acquisition.The within-text gloss type outperform other types and the gloss with textual enhancement outperform the other type.(2)Different gloss types have different effects on vocabulary retention.The gloss position do not have significantly different effects on vocabulary retention but the gloss with textual enhancement outperform the other type.(3) Different gloss types do not have significantly different effects on reading comprehension. This study can be helpful for English teachers, students and English material editors.