What is Annotations

This study addresses the views of 9 students on the amount of invested mental effort (Salomon, 1983a) needed to effectively process multimedia annotations (pictorial and written) so as to learn from a second language (L2) aural passage. Initially, 67 college students in a second-semester French course listened to a multimedia based French passage. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four listening treatments that contained either no annotations, written annotations, pictorial annotations, or both annotation types. Follow up vocabulary production and recall protocol tests measured vocabulary learning and aural comprehension. From these 67 students, 9 were selected to participate in interviews based on treatment type and posttest results. After examining anecdotal information and test results of these 9 students, it appears that the amount of invested mental effort applied to processing different annotation types varied in its influence on their abilities to learn French vocabulary and on their aural comprehension.