Concordance-Based Glosses for Academic Vocabulary Acquisition

This study compares the effectiveness of online textual glosses enhanced with modified corpus-extracted sentences presented in concordance lines and textual glosses enhanced with dictionary definitions drawn from an online learner's dictionary for academic vocabulary learning at higher proficiency levels. Particularly, the study aimed to determine which textual gloss technique would be most beneficial in helping intermediate to advanced language learners, who likely possess foundational receptive knowledge, i.e. they recognize the word and know the definition, gain productive knowledge of academic lexical items. While the usefulness of multimedia and image-based glosses are not disputed, lexical items from an academic word list may not be easily glossed through these techniques, and the development of a concordance-based modality may prove beneficial for more proficient learners seeking productive vocabulary knowledge. Also investigated were learner attitudes towards the textual annotation techniques. Participants in both experimental groups exhibited post test gains in receptive and judgment tasks, but only the concordance-based group displayed improvement on the productive assessment. Further, the concordance-based group responded that the glosses were beneficial and likely to be used for subsequent language study, while the dictionary group indicated the glosses would not be later used as the annotations were perceived as ineffective.