Effects of images on the incidental acquisition of abstract words

Recently, research has investigated whether glossing individual vocabulary words in a reading text with multimedia annotations-either with text, video, or still images- helps students learn the individual items, and therefore improve comprehension (Chun, Plass, 1996; Al-Seghayer, 2001). The studies, which are built around the assumption that students can learn better and more efficiently when information is presented in more than one mode, revealed a positive correlation between imagery and vocabulary acquisition. However, most studies focusing on teaching vocabulary incidentally with multimedia annotations annotated only the more concrete words which can easily be portrayed using still images or video. Research attempting to investigate whether or not still images can adequately represent unknown, abstract vocabulary words, and whether or not they can help the student make meaning of the word, is still identified as a particular need (Kost, Foss and Lenzini, 1999). This study investigates whether still images can adequately represent an abstract word from a language learners\u27 perspective, if still images can help create meaning of unfamiliar, abstract words for ESL learners, and whether imaging abstract words become less meaningful to students the lesser the word\u27s imageability and concreteness ratings (Paivio, Yuille, and Madigan ,1968)