Effects of Electronic Dictionary on Vocabulary Retention and Reading Comprehension of EFL Undergraduate Students in a Thai University

Snea Thinsan
Language Education, Indiana University

Literature Review

Limited vocabulary knowledge is a major problem in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) reading classes at university level in Thailand (Wiroonrat & Thinsan, 1999). It is arguable whether paper-based dictionaries are practically useful for weak students in a reading class. Thai is, they do not carry them around or along. Indeed, weak students would have to open the dictionary every 10 seconds, due to their limited vocabulary knowledge, and this would interrupt with the cognitive process required for goof reading comprehension. Electronic dictionaries almost intuitively seem to be a good answer for Thai students learning to read English at university level, because they can provide faster and easier access to the meanings of unknown words in unobtrusive, multimedia format (Gettys, Imhof, & Kautz, 2001). My pilot study’s main aim is to compare the effects of the electronic dictionary and paper-based dictionary in terms of the students’ vocabulary learning retention and reading comprehension.

Among the earlier studies, Leffa (1992) compared the efficacy of electronic dictionary glossaries with the traditional paper dictionary on text comprehension in a translation task among 20 university students enrolled in a beginner English for academic purposes course.  The hypotheses were that the electronic dictionary users would spend less time with translation and have better comprehension.  Five 100-word passages taken from an English newspaper were selected for the reading comprehension test. Two reading comprehension tests were administered for each subject, one test using a medium-sized 40,000- bilingual dictionary, and the other using the electronic glossary. The comprehension task was to translate the original English text into Portuguese.  For analysis of the results, each of the five passages was divided into idea units and graded separately by two scorers.  The scorers gave marks for each idea unit recovered by the subjects.  The results indicated that the electronic dictionary users understood more of the passage (86%) than the traditional dictionary users (62%) and needed 50% less time to translate the passage. This study involved convenience sample of only 20 students, and there was no attempt to investigate the students’ actual look-up behavior and its effects on their performance.

Responses by other researchers resulted in several studies involving learner behavior tracking (see, for example, Chun & Plass, 1996; Davis & Lyman-Hager, 1997; Lomicka, 1998; Laufer & Hill, 2000). Davis et al. (1997) examined what users actually did when they read in the L2 with computer assistance.  The subjects were 42 intermediate French learners at an American University.  The research questions addressed at three issues: the relationship between the informational choices of the provided computerized glosses and their comprehension of a French-African literary text; the interaction between the informational choices made by individual learners and their understanding of a particularly difficult segment of the passage; and the users’ perceptions of the computer program used.  The subjects were asked to read an excerpt from an African novel first on paper and then on the computer with the aid of the program designed to allow students to click on unknown words to: obtain their definitions in English or French, get the antecedent or referent of a word, obtain brief grammatical explanations or information on African culture, or choose to hear a certain word’s pronunciation by a native French speaker.  The program had an unobtrusive query log which tracked learners’ look-up behavior. After reading, the subjects wrote a free-response recall protocol and take a multiple-choice test on the passage content.  At the end, they gave an exit interview about their reactions to the program, which was recorded on audio tape.  Comprehension was operationalized as performance on the two assessment instruments. It was found that the most frequently consulted category was English definition.  They also found a negative correlation between the looked up information and the course grade, as well as a positive correlation between the recall protocol and the multiple choice test and course grade.  The type of information accessed on the computer was found to have no effect on comprehension. (The researchers offered two explanations for the problematic finding: a lack of user experience with computerized glosses; and the difficulty of the passage.) In addition, the relationship between subjects’ consultation of the gloss and quantity and accuracy of recall varied greatly across the group.  Lastly, students showed unanimous preference for the electronic dictionary glosses to the traditional mode, but there was no clear evidence that it had actually enhanced comprehension.  The researchers suggested that better training on how to use the program would encourage more effective use and the program could be further adapted.

              Another similar study by Lomicka (1998) tried to analyze the think aloud protocols of 12 native English speakers during a computerized reading task in French to find out whether glossing aids comprehension. She asked two research questions: What is the relationship between type and number of glosses consulted and the number of inferences generated?; and Do multimedia annotations allow the reader to build a situation model? However, the results were fairly unclear due to the small number of subjects (12 French learners).

When multimedia annotations became increasingly used, Chun and Plass (1996) investigated the effects of multimodal glosses on vocabulary acquisition.  Their three research questions were: How well is vocabulary learned incidentally when the purpose of the task is reading comprehension?; What is the effectiveness of annotations with different media types for vocabulary acquisition?; and What is the relationship between look-up behavior of vocabulary items that have annotations and performance on vocabulary test?  The research questions were investigated in three separate studies employing the same methodology but a different number of subjects. There were altogether 160 subjects comprising the second-year German students at three universities in California.  The three studies followed the same procedure. First, there was a brief orientation to the CyberBuch program used in the study, followed by a two-minute video preview of the short story used. Then, the subjects read the story, looking up the meaning of words by using annotations. Next, they took a vocabulary test right upon completion of the reading. Lastly, they wrote a recall protocol summarizing the story in their L1.   The available types of glosses were text definitions (in English and, in Study 1, in German), text + picture, and text + video. All types of glosses were accompanied by an audio aid with a German native speaker pronouncing the words. The annotations could be selected any number of times and in any order.  The program also recorded every action by each user.  In all three studies the subjects took an unannounced vocabulary test containing the words that had different glosses in the program.  The students had to provide an English equivalent to German words, and indicate which glosses they felt had helped them remember the word.  It is necessary to note that the test from the third study was different, in which the subjects were presented with a sequence of 18 visual annotations (pictures or videos), followed by 18 definitions, and then, were asked to choose the German word (from a list of 6) that corresponded to the picture/video or definition. Also, studies 1 and 3 used the delayed post-test while study 2 used immediate test. Analysis of the production tests revealed that the results of delayed-posttest were higher than the immediate posttest.  Despite other generally positive results, the data suggested that there was no one mode that was helpful to all learners, but that different types of learners looked up different types of annotations and learned more successfully with the preferred modes. 

In their later study,  Plass, et al. (1998) examined the role of individual differences in multimedia learning among 103 subjects using the same computer program and short story as in their 1996 study’s.  Their questions were on whether visualizers, those who prefer visual information, and verbalizers, those who prefer verbal information, differ in their behavior in multimedia learning environment, and how their differing needs can be supported to improve their overall learning outcomes.  The log files of subjects’ look up behavior were also used.  The important findings were as follows. The combination of visual and verbal learning modes and the subjects’ access to preferred modes were, again, found to result in higher performance on the vocabulary test. The results of the comprehension test showed an interaction in which verbalizers did not profit from the addition of visual information to their preferred verbal type of information to the same extent as visualizers do.

              Among the most recent studies, Laufer and Hill (2000) investigated the relationship between the L2 learners’ dictionary lookup patterns and their vocabulary retention. Different types of dictionary information were incorporated into a CALL program called Words in Your Ear. The program consisted of four components: a pre-test of the words targeted for investigation; a text where these words appear highlighted; dictionary information for each word in the form of five options; and log files where every mouse click selecting these options is recorded.  Three research questions were: What percentage of words is remembered after being looked up in an electronic dictionary during a reading task?; Are different lookup preferences associated with different levels of retention?; and Is there a relationship between the number of lookups and retention? The subjects were 32 EFL students from Israel (IL), and 40 ESL students from Hong Kong (HK), all selected on the basis of the university entrance exams, which were different for the two groups. The subjects were taking EAP courses at their respective universities. The pilot study, which used a short extract from an academic text of general interest with 30 students who were not involved in the main study, helped identify twelve unfamiliar words.  After the pre-test, the students who were familiar with more than one of the target words were eliminated from a larger pool of subjects (97). The remaining subjects (72) then received the text with the target words. They were asked to read the text and understand it for comprehension questions that would follow. They were told that they could look up information about the target words by choosing different options in the dictionary (Hear word, English meaning, L1 translation, Extra information, and Root), but they were not told the vocabulary items would be tested. Data analysis revealed that all target words were looked up, but the percentages of the retained words for the two groups were different 33.3 for the IL learners and 62 for the HK learners. Despite such contradict results, the researchers concluded that the results of the study support the claim that the use of electronic dictionaries has a positive effect on incidental vocabulary acquisition. However, it has not been demonstrated conclusively that a particular lookup strategy yields the best results. The most valuable finding suggested that multiplicity of lexical information seems to be associated with better retention, and greater attention to a word during the lookup matters more than the number of lookups.

Conclusion

            As can be seen in the above studies, a number of questions and crucial points are left for future research and critical considerations. First, there existed several variables in each of these investigations, which caused difficulty in pinpointing what influenced the results. A study that pointed out the superiority of electronic dictionary over the traditional dictionary (Lauffa, 1992) did not even explore what the students actually did.  Also, different ways of dictionary use and deep processing seem to be two mixed variables that were not well separated. Furthermore, the subjects in these studies, regardless of positive or negative outcomes, selected different types of annotations, making the conclusions on the relationships between the look up patterns and comprehension or vocabulary acquisition ungeneralizable.  Plus, some affective variables that go with various lookup patterns could have influenced the results, but have not been studied. While the results were not straightforward, most of these studies used convenient or purposive samples; therefore, generalizability is very much in doubt. 

            The unconvincing results and low generalizability present as a result of  this literature review call for more research in many aspects. This pilot study, given such scenarios and due to the non-existence of research on electronic dictionaries at university in Thailand, will readdress the specific question about the effects of multimodal glosses on vocabulary acquisition and reading comprehension, adopting the design of Chun and Plass’ (1996) study, a most carefully designed one so far.

References

            Chun, D., & Plass, J. (1996). Effects of multimedia annotations on vocabulary acquisition. The Modern Language Journal, 80, 183-198.

            Davis, J., & Lyman-Hagar, M. A.  (1997). Computers and L2 reading: Student performance, student attitudes. Foreign Language Annals, 30, 58-71.

            Gettys, S., Imhof, L. A., & Kautz, J. O. (2001). Computer-assisted reading: The effect of glossing format on comprehension and vocabulary retention. Foreign Language Annals, 34 (2), 91-99.

            Laufer, B., & Hill, M. (2000). What lexical information do L2 learners select in a CALL

dictionary and how does it affect word retention? Language Learning and Technology, 3, 58-76. Retrieved from the World Wide Web September 9, 2000: http://llt.msu.edu/vol3num2/laufer-hill/index.htm

            Leffa, V. (1992). Making foreign language texts comprehensible for beginners: An experiment with an electronic glossary. System, 20, 63-73.

            Lomicka, L. (1998). “To gloss or not to gloss”: An investigation of reading comprehension Electronic. Language Learning and Technology, 1, 41-50. Retrieved from the World Wide Web December 21, 2000: http://llt.msu.edu/vol1num2/article2/default.htm

            Plass, J., Chun, D., Mayer, R., & Leutner, D. (1998). Supporting visual and verbal learning references in a second-language multimedia learning environment. Journal of Educational Psychology, 90, 25-36.

            Roby, W.B. (1999) "What's in a gloss?". Language Learning and Technology 2, 94-101.  Retrieved from the World Wide Web November 11, 2000:           http://llt.msu.edu/vol2num2/roby/
                Wiroonrat, J. & Thinsan, S. (1998). A study of the English learning and using behavior of the fourth year arts students of Chiang Mai University. Faculty of Humanities, Chiang Mai University.