Lee B Abraham
The World Wide Web and emerging multimedia tools and software provide students with unprecedented opportunities to comprehend authentic texts and learn new vocabulary by using and creating annotations with written and spoken text and visual information. The present study examines the effects of pictorial (videos, images) and verbal (Spanish definitions, English translations) glosses/annotations on vocabulary learning and comprehension of an authentic literary text. Participants were randomly assigned to one of the following groups: 1) control (without access to glosses), 2) choice-lookup (access to verbal and pictorial glosses), 3) forced-lookup (required to consult all available verbal and pictorial glosses). Choice and forced-lookup groups performed significantly better on the vocabulary test and summary than the control group. No statistically significant differences in performance were found between choice and forced-lookup groups.