The Effect Of Different Multimedia Annotations On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition In Junior High School English Reading

With the development of computer-assisted language teaching,some researchers have begun to pay attention to multimedia annotations,that is,adding notes,videos,pictures,and even animations to annotations to makes it more diverse.Previous studies have focused on the study of single multimedia annotation,and few studies has been done on collaborative annotations.Based on the previous studies on multimedia annotation,this study made full use of modern multimedia computer technology and proposes three research questions:(1)In the immediate vocabulary test,how do the three annotation methods,namely,text+picture(TP),text+audio(TA)and picture+audio(PA)affect the incidental vocabulary acquisition?(2)In the delayed vocabulary test,how these three annotation methods affect the retention of the learned words?(3)What are the students’ attitudes towards multimedia annotations on incidental vocabulary acquisition?This study adopted experimental and interview methods.The entire empirical study lasted 6weeks involving pretest,reading,post-test,and data collection.In the experiment,the subjects were 118 students from junior high school.Ten unfamiliar words in the reading material were selected as the target words and three different annotations were used,that is,text + audio(TA)、text + picture(TP)and picture + audio(PA).After the reading comprehension,the subjects were tested for short-term memory of the target words without prior notice,and two weeks later,the students were asked to complete the long-term memory test of the target words.After the delayed test,one students was randomly selected in each group in order to observe their attitudes toward multimedia annotations on incidental vocabulary acquisition.The findings are as follows:(1)In the immediate vocabulary test,the result shows that picture + audio(PA)group outperforms text + picture(TP),text + audio(TA).The effect of picture + audio(PA)on vocabulary acquisition is significantly greater than the other two pairs.There is no obvious difference between text + picture(TP)group and text + audio(AT)annotation group.(2)In the delayed vocabulary test,all the scores of delayed vocabulary test apparently decreased considerably,but in both of immediate and delayed tests,the effect of three types of annotations on incidental vocabulary acquisition remained the same: the effect of picture+ audio(PA)on vocabulary acquisition was significantly greater than the other two pairs.text +audio(TA)is the worst.(3)Interviewees gave positive feedback on the multimedia annotations they used in reading,saying that multimedia annotations can help them acquire new words.According to the analysis and research data,multimedia annotation plays a very positive role in helping incidental vocabulary acquisition.It has certain enlightenment to English teaching.When making courseware products,teachers and multimedia textbook editors should fully and actively consider adopting appropriate and reasonable word annotation methods which can really help students achieve better acquisition of vocabulary and understanding of articles;Hopefully the results of this study can guide teachers to make full use of the advantages of multimedia information combination and improve their teaching quality.