Effects of students' participation in authoring of multimedia materials on student acquisition of vocabulary

This study investigated the effects on vocabulary acquisition of student participation in authoring a multimedia instructional module.Sixty-two subjects were randomly assigned to two groups, and each group was randomly assigned to one of two treatments.The control subjects were asked to study a French text downloaded from the Internet and presented on a computer.In the text, 20 relatively low-frequency words were annotated with text, sound, and pictures.The experimental subjects had the same text but without annotations.They were asked to participate in creating annotations for the same 20 target words.The study produced evidence that students learn vocabulary significantly better when they participate in the creation of the instructional module, provided time is not considered.However, when the variable of time on task is taken into account, there is no statistically significant difference between the experimental and the control treatments.In addition, annotations containing text, sound, and pictures were found to be more helpful for vocabulary learning than annotations with sound and text only.The results are discussed in light of theories of vocabulary acquisition and active student involvement in the learning process.Practical applications and ideas for further research are suggested.The present study reports data from an investigation of the effects of student participation in authoring of multimedia materials, based on authentic French texts downloaded from the Internet, on student vocabulary acquisition.This investigation sought to determine whether acquisition of foreign language vocabulary was higher for students who helped author the materials compared to students who simply Ofelia R.