Effects of Collaborative Multimedia Annotations on Elementary School Students' Vocabulary Learning Performance

Many studies have focused on developing technology-assisted English vocabulary learning systems to improve English vocabulary learning performance because English vocabulary size critically affects reading fluency. Collaborative reading annotation systems have been verified the effectiveness of promoting reading performance because collaboratively annotating digital texts allows learners to add valued information, share ideas, and create knowledge. However, few have used them to improve English vocabulary learning from collaborative aspects. Therefore, based on a quasi-experimental research method, this work examines how a proposed web-based collaborative reading annotation system with multimedia annotations (WCRASMA) supports three combinations of multimedia annotations including voice and text (VT), voice and picture (VP), and voice, text, and picture (VTP) influences the English vocabulary learning performance and the vocabulary retention of elementary school learners. The results of this work confirm that VTP is the most effective among the three considered combinations of multimedia annotations for English vocabulary learning performance. Learners who use VTP annotations and those using VP annotations greatly outperform those who use VT annotations in the retention of English vocabulary. Learners with a visual cognitive style who use VTP annotations exhibit a higher English vocabulary learning performance and retention than those with a visual cognitive style who use VT annotations. This study also confirms that the positive correlation between number of browsed annotations and vocabulary learning performance exists for VT and VP groups, but the correlation has not been found in VTP group.