Investigating the Impact of Multimedia Annotations on Learning Lexical Collocations among Saudi EFL Learners

Abstract

Previous studies have reported evidence in favor of multimedia annotations in the form of definitions and pictures for second language (L2) vocabulary learning, but no studies examined whether multimedia annotations could also be effective beyond individual words, especially for learning lexical collocations. The present study investigated the effect of multimedia annotations containing textual definitions and static pictures on learning infrequent verb-noun and adjective-noun collocations as well as the participants’ ability to retain them. Using a two-group pretest-posttest research design, 10 Saudi English as a foreign language (EFL) learners were randomly assigned to an experimental group and a control group. During a two-week treatment, participants assigned to the experimental group read six short stories from a webpage containing the target collocations with access to pictures and definitions, while participants assigned to the control group read the same stories with access to the definitions only. Participants’ knowledge of the target collocations was assessed by immediate and delayed form and meaning recall and recognition post-tests. The results did not provide evidence that multimedia annotations are more effective than text-only annotations for learning unfamiliar lexical collocations. In fact, the two types of annotations were likely to bring about comparable advantages, with no one type outperforming the other.