CALL/MCALL

This study compared the effects of two annotation modalities on the reading comprehension of Iranian intermediate level EFL learners. The two experimental groups under study received treatment on 10 academic L2 reading passages under one of two conditions: One group received treatment on key words in the reading passages through a multimedia environment providing textual annotations. The second group received treatment under a similar environment but received compound glosses. The control group, however, received no treatment and was encouraged to use contextual guessing. The findings revealed that the experimental group who received treatment through compound glosses outperformed the other two groups on the comprehension test, and the group who used textual annotations obtained a higher mean on the post-test than the control group. One explanation is that compound glosses might help learners better decipher the meanings of key words in L2 passages, thus contributing to their deeper understanding of the texts.

Convictions are strong that multimedia courseware holds great promise for enhancing learning efficiency among learners. This study thus aimed at comparing the effects of the multimedia programs introducing 100 vocabulary items through pictures and streaming video with those of teacher instruction on increasing EFL learners' vocabulary repertoire. A total of 120 subjects were identified as intermediate-level students based on the scores they obtained on the reading and listening sections of an IELTS and were randomly assigned to four equivalent groups. One group served as the pilot group, two as the experimental groups, and the other as the control group. The pilot group participated in the pilot study of the vocabulary test that was designed by the researcher as the pre-and posttest. The two experimental groups received treatment on teaching the vocabulary items through a Motion-Picture Multimedia Program (MPMP) or a Still-Picture Multimedia Program (SPMP). The control group received a treatment on the same vocabulary items through teacher instruction. The results favored the use of the multimedia programs, albeit the multimedia program drawing on streaming video proved to be more effective than the one using still pictures. Therefore, the findings revealed that dual coding of vocabulary might occur at different degrees across different methods of vocabulary teaching, resulting in varying degrees of the learning success.

This research explores the effects of three computer-mediated feedback modalities, that is, elicitation, recast, and meta-linguistics, on the learning of English participial, gerund, and infinitival phrases among Iranian intermediate-level EFL learners. The overriding focus of the present study was to investigate whether different types of feedback given through form-focused computer-human exchanges would produce varying immediate and long-term effects on the participants' incorporation of linguistic forms. To this end, 160 participants were randomly assigned to three equivalent experimental groups. One group then received treatment on the three types of phrases through a tutorial system and multimedia grammar exercises where they received elicitation on the errors they made. The second and the third groups likewise received treatment on the same types of phrases through the same tutorial system, but received either recast or meta-linguistic feedback on their errors. The groups then sat for an immediate and a delayed post-test of grammar two weeks after the experiment. The experiment revealed that meta-linguistic feedback yielded the strongest immediate and sustained effects as compared with those of elicitation and recast. Likewise, while recast produced stronger immediate effects on learning as compared to those of elicitation, its sustained effects were much smaller than those of elicitation and meta-linguistic feedback.

This research explored the effects of three types of multimedia glosses on the reading comprehension of learners in an EFL context. From among the three experimental groups under study, one received treatment on five academic reading passages through picto-textual glosses where both textual definitions and relevant images of words popped up, thus helping learners surmise the meanings of the keywords. In a similar vein, the other two groups received treatment on the same passages, but used either pictorial or textual glosses where pertinent pictures or textual definitions of the keywords appeared on the screen. The experiment showed that the picto-textual-gloss group outperformed the other two groups, and that the pictorial-gloss group outperformed the textual-gloss group. The study thus underpinned Dual Coding Theory, arguing that when information is available in two modes of presentation, it becomes more elaborate and thus more memorable. When applied to reading comprehension, the idea suggests that the combination of textual and visual definitions might help learners better decipher the meanings of keywords in reading passages, and hence arrive at an even deeper comprehension of the texts.