The Effects of Multimodal Glosses on Incidental Vocabulary Learning

[[abstract]]Experimental evidences have confirmed Paivio’s (1986) Dual Coding Theory, which claims that the verbal system and visual system in human memory can support each other to make learning more efficient. As for its application to incidental vocabulary learning, it is found that textual glosses with visual information better help learning than text-only glosses. Nowadays, not only still graphics are accessible, animation is also a way that we can get access to. This study thus aims to compare the effectiveness of still graphics and animation on incidental vocabulary learning for beginning EFL learners. Three classes of eighth-grade junior high school students, totaling 70 students, were recruited. One class read reading passages with the help of graphics-plus-text glosses, another with animation-plus-text glosses, and the other with text-only glosses. All of the three classes included male students and female students. The instruments contained production and recognition vocabulary tests and the study adapted a pretest-immediate posttest-delayed posttest measurement. A two-by-three factorial design was utilized and the results were analyzed by two-way ANOVA. Immediate posttest results showed that the effects of graphics-plus-text glosses were better than that of text-only glosses while the differences between graphics-plus- text glosses and animation-plus- text glosses were found insignificant. As for vocabulary gain, students using animation-plus-text glosses and graphics-plus-text glosses performed better than those using text-only glosses on production test, while the overall vocabulary gain didn’t show group differences. As to sex differences, no main effects were found in all tests. Besides, all of the recognition tests were not sensitive to the independent variables in this study. The conclusions were drawn as the following: first, textual glosses with visual aids (animation or graphics) better help learners’ incidental vocabulary learning than text-only glosses, which supports dual-coding theory. Second, animation cues do not have a better effect on incidental vocabulary learning than graphics cues. In fact, students using graphics+ text glosses showed an advantage over the other two types of glosses: animation+ text glosses and text-only glosses.