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This project measured the effect of using hypermedia annotations on short and long-term vocabulary retention in teaching vocabulary through Web-based language learning activities. A total of 62 university students were randomly assigned into two homogeneous groups; and then both groups were given a pre-test. Both groups covered 12 expository passages selected by the researchers from the BBC website. The subjects had to sit for an immediate quiz to measure the short-term effect of the treatment and finally, at the end of the course and a two-week interval, subjects sat for their post-test. Findings revealed that there was a significant effect of the hypermedia annotations on the retention of vocabulary in the short term (p
2011 Association for Learning Technology. B. Gorjian. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 UK: England & Wales licence ( -nc-nd/2.0/uk/) permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
The ideas mentioned above are all well dealt with the advent of hypermedia. The use of computer technology in teaching languages has been dramatically increasing worldwide over the past decade (e.g. O'Dowd 2003; Chen, Belkada, and Okamoto 2004; Hayati 2005; Hubbard and Levy 2006; Son 2008). Using this technology not only facilitates learning processes (Gorjian 2008), but also holds other great potentials for language learning. One of these potentialities is the ability to present information in different formats using graphics, sound, text and video with links to other chunks of information through using WBLL activities (Robb 2006; Son 2007; Cummins 2008a, 2008b).
Hypermedia annotations have several advantages; researches carried out by Boers, Eyckmans, and Stengers (2004) and Abraham (2008) have provided evidence of an overall beneficial role for computer-mediated text glosses providing lexical support on comprehending authentic readings and learning vocabulary. Researchers were inspired by the premise that a variety of glosses for words in various modalities, such as printed text, graphics, dynamic video and sound, might have differing capacities to facilitate vocabulary acquisition and retention (De Ridder 2002; Boers and Lindstromberg 2005).
Presenting information in this way enables readers to access information in the order most appropriate to their purposes. Using appropriate presentation methods enables learners to obtain a deeper impression of and richer information about the target words to make them enter the long-term memory more easily (Zhang 2008). In addition, in traditional approaches any unexpected subject matter (vocabulary, in our case) cannot be dealt with in advance, no matter how necessary. In our case, if a word out of the blue poses a problem, in traditional approaches teachers could not think of ways of dealing with that word without shifting the focus in class and diverting time (McDonald 2008). For these reasons, comprehensive vocabulary knowledge seems indispensable but almost impractical to achieve in traditional classes.
This study was conducted with sample of 62 Iranian EFL students based on non-random convenient sampling. They had entered university for their undergraduate studies. Subjects were selected based on a given TOEFL test, Barron's 2003 edition, and the results of the test indicated that in terms of educational background, level of English mastery and vocabulary knowledge, the subjects were homogeneous and could be considered as intermediate in their proficiency stamina. Then they were divided into two groups based on systematic random sampling. The subjects were 62 (15 males and 47 females) students with the age ranging from 21 to 39. They were measured under two conditions: plain text group (i.e. control group who dealt with the plain texts) and hypermedia group (i.e. experimental group who dealt with hypermedia annotations).
1. Pilot test: To investigate the suitability of the level of the text and to examine how much time it would take the subjects to complete the task, a pilot test of hypermedia version of the text was conducted with five students who did not take part in the actual research. The reliability of each and every test used in this research was calculated by Kuder-Richardson formula (KR-21). The reliability coefficients for the pre-test and the post-test were 0.75 and 0.74 respectively.
2. Pre-test: A pre-test containing the actual test items was administered to the subjects before treatment in order to determine how well the subjects knew the contents before treatment. The subjects were asked to answer 40 multiple-choice vocabulary questions, selected from the course passages, in 30 minutes. To ensure that students did not give more attention than they should to the words appearing in the pre-test, no mention was made of the subsequent learning lessons and the immediate quizzes or post-test.
4. Post-test: Two weeks later after the end of the course, the instructor administered the post-test without notice. The sudden presence of the instructor in the class was to test the retention of words in a longer period to see the real effect of the treatment. The only difference of this test to the pre-test was that the order of questions was changed to wipe out the probable recall of pre-test answers.
5. Multidimensionality (MI) test: It was claimed earlier that hypermedia can boost multidimensionality knowledge of vocabulary in language learners. Therefore a pronunciation test was designed at two levels, in one level, which was comprised of a written part of the test, components of vocabulary were put into questions. This part consisted of 10 items and each item was testing phonetic transcription, part of speech, past form of the verb, superlative form of adjective and plural form of noun for a chosen vocabulary from the passages covered.
Since this comparative study consists of two distinct approaches to vocabulary learning, the materials used were the same for both groups except for the medium of presentation, for this reason two kinds of presentation were used, namely, hypermedia presentation and the plain text presentation.
Expository passages from the BBC website
www.bbclearningenglish.com were selected for this study. Subjects viewed 12 passages over six sessions where each session lasted for about one hour. Subjects in both groups were not informed in advance that they would be tested because it was assumed that if they knew, they would consciously try to learn the new words. It was hoped that attempting to prevent the subjects from making such a conscious effort would create a more natural environment.
The subjects in the hypermedia group (n=31) were introduced to a hypermedia-learning programme, designed by the researchers for the vocabulary retention. The programme provides users reading an expository English text with a variety of glosses or annotations for words in the form of text, graphics, video and sound, all of which are intended to aid in the understanding and learning of unknown words. The plain text group (n=31) were put into the control group with the same material except for the medium of presentation (i.e. paper).
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