Effect of Annotation Preferences of the EFL Students’ on Their Level of Vocabulary Recall and Retention

Abstract

The contemporary era brings technology into every part of our lives. As a result of technological improvements, education process has been affected and the use of technological devices is inevitable. Teaching language has also been affected by this movement. Thus, Mobile-Assisted Language Learning has gained importance through the recent years. Within light of these, the aim of this study is to understand the effect of annotation use on vocabulary recall and retention levels of English as a foreign language students. A software called Vocastyle was developed for this study. It included annotations that helped students to learn and remember new vocabulary items. The participants of the study were 122 students of a state elementary school in which multimedia learning is benefited at a major city of Turkey. In order to understand whether the use of annotations caused any difference between students’ level of vocabulary recall and retention, the pre-, post-, and delayed posttests were applied. Quantitative data analyses were done via descriptive statistics, chi-square, multivariate analysis of variance, and Kruskal–Wallis and Mann–Whitney U tests. The results implied that learners who used multimedia annotations recalled and retained better than the learners who used paper-based annotations and who received no treatment at all.