Effects of images on the incidental acquisition of abstract words

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2005-01-01
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O'Bryan, Anne
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English

The Department of English seeks to provide all university students with the skills of effective communication and critical thinking, as well as imparting knowledge of literature, creative writing, linguistics, speech and technical communication to students within and outside of the department.

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The Department of English and Speech was formed in 1939 from the merger of the Department of English and the Department of Public Speaking. In 1971 its name changed to the Department of English.

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1939-present

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  • Department of English and Speech (1939-1971)

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English
Abstract

Recently, research has investigated whether glossing individual vocabulary words in a reading text with multimedia annotations-either with text, video, or still images- helps students learn the individual items, and therefore improve comprehension (Chun, Plass, 1996; Al-Seghayer, 2001). The studies, which are built around the assumption that students can learn better and more efficiently when information is presented in more than one mode, revealed a positive correlation between imagery and vocabulary acquisition. However, most studies focusing on teaching vocabulary incidentally with multimedia annotations annotated only the more concrete words which can easily be portrayed using still images or video. Research attempting to investigate whether or not still images can adequately represent unknown, abstract vocabulary words, and whether or not they can help the student make meaning of the word, is still identified as a particular need (Kost, Foss and Lenzini, 1999). This study investigates whether still images can adequately represent an abstract word from a language learners' perspective, if still images can help create meaning of unfamiliar, abstract words for ESL learners, and whether imaging abstract words become less meaningful to students the lesser the word's imageability and concreteness ratings (Paivio, Yuille, and Madigan ,1968).

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Sat Jan 01 00:00:00 UTC 2005