Education Publications
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
6-1-2017
Journal
System
Volume
66
First Page
113
Last Page
129
URL with Digital Object Identifier
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2017.03.017
Abstract
This article reports three trials of a pen-and-paper experiment where adult L2 learners’ recollection of glossed words was tested after they had read a text with or without pictures included in the glosses. Unlike previous studies in which a superiority of multimodal glosses over text-only glosses was claimed, the experiment furnished no evidence that the addition of pictures helped the learners to retain the glossed words’ form-meaning association any better than providing glosses containing only verbal explanations. When learners were prompted to recall of the written form of the words, the gloss condition without pictures in fact led to the better performance. The results suggest that the provision of pictures alongside textual information to elucidate the meaning of novel words may reduce the amount of attention that L2 readers give to the form of these words.
Citation of this paper:
Boers, F., Warren, P., He, L., & Deconinck, J. (2017). Does adding pictures to glosses enhance vocabulary uptake from reading? System, 66, 113-129.
