The effects of multimedia glosses, learning duration and working memory capacity on high school students' passive vocabulary acquisition

Abstract

Many past studies had found that multimedia learning is conducive to students’ English vocabulary acquisition. This research was aimed at investigating this issue deeper by evaluating the influence of multimedia glosses, learning duration, and working memory capacity. To investigate the effect of the effects of multimedia glosses, sixty-three high school students were tested to learn English vocabularies with multimedia glosses, such as demonstrating words with their translations and their corresponding pictures, or pronunciation glosses. To examine the influence of learning duration, the participants were tested to learned within different learning durations for each of word, ranging from 3 to 7 seconds. To study the impact of working memory capacity, the participants were comprehensively measured in terms of phonological working memory capacity through Children's Test of Nonword Repetition, and visuospatial working memory capacity through Visual Pattern Test. Finally, the participants’ performance in English vocabulary acquisition was extensively measured by both Form Recognition Test (whether can recognize the learned words) and Passive Recall Test (whether can remember the translation for each presented word). This study found that, for the effects of multimedia glosses on vocabulary acquisition, compared with only demonstrating translation, the pronunciation or picture glosses did not always demonstrate its superiority in facilitating the participants to recognize the words or remember the translation of the words. The efficiency of the multimedia glosses was influenced by the learning duration and vocabulary acquisition test type. With the extension of learning duration from 3 to 7 seconds, this study found that the participants’ performance in vocabulary acquisition decreased when measured by the Form Recognition Test. It sounds interesting that the participants’ performance in passive vocabulary acquisition achieved the highest score when the learning duration was 5 seconds when measured by Passive Recall Test. Regarding the effects of working memory capacity, the high phonological working memory capacity and visuospatial working memory capacity group could recognize more words that has been learned. However, while the high visuospatial working memory capacity group achieved higher score in remembering vocabulary translation than the low visuospatial working memory capacity group, phonological working memory capacity demonstrated a reversed effect on the translation memorization. This phenomenon is worth for further study.