O uso do glossário hipermídia no ensino-aprendizagem implícito de vocabulário nos níveis elementar e intermediário de proficiência em inglês

Abstract

The present work is aimed at investigating the use of the hypermedia gloss in the teaching and learning of implicit vocabulary of elementary and intermediate level English students as a foreign language. On theoretical grounds, the work is based on the assumptions of the Cognitive Theory of the Multimedia Learning by Mayer (1997; 2001) and the Integrated Model of the Multimedia Effects on Learning by Hede (2002) which seek to explain the information processing in a multimodal learning environment, and on the assumptions of the Connectionism Approach (ELLIS, 1998; LEITE, 2008; ZIMMER, 2008). In the methodology for this exploratory research, we developed a reading activity with hypermedia gloss in order to investigate the impacts of this gloss in the teaching and learning of implicit vocabulary of elementary and intermediate level English students as a foreign language. The experiment was applied to a total of 130 students: 70 students of elementary level and 60 students of intermediate level. In the analysis it was used the data generated in vocabulary tests, applied to both groups of students, supplemented with questionnaire data, interview and navigation recording in the hypermedia environment. The results show that the use of the hypermedia gloss may contribute significantly to implicit vocabulary learning at elementary and intermediate level. However, in the comparative condition, the elementary group seems to benefit most from its use. The analysis also indicates that for elementary level students the annotations which most contribute to the inference of unknown words are the verbal + picture annotation. The analysis also indicates that, for this group, the hypermedia gloss needs to be carefully prepared because different factors such as the presentation order of the medias and the excess of annotated words along the text may negatively impact learning. As for the intermediate level students, the annotation which most contributes to the inference is the verbal one, due to the greater linguistic knowledge of this group, which makes it comparatevely less dependente on hypermedia.