Evaluating Types and Combinations of Multimodal Presentations in the Retention and Transfer of Concrete Vocabulary in Efl Learning

Although multimodality has been addressed in the educational psychology arena, this study evaluates the effects of presentation modality in the retention and transfer of concrete vocabulary in students of English as a second language. The participants were 104 second year university students belonging to three groups. Group 1 (n=32) was exposed to vocabulary through on screen text and narration (Group TN); group 2 (n=42) was exposed to on screen text, narration and video (Group TNV); and group 3 (n=30) was presented vocabulary via on screen text, narration and still image (Group TNI). All three groups were given a retention test (RT), a transfer test (TT), and a questionnaire to evaluate the type of presentation (TPQ). Results indicate that in the RT there are statistically significant differences among groups (ANOVA), being the TNI group the one that retains more lexical items. In the TT, using the t-student, results show that there are significant differences between groups TNI and TN, being group TNI the one with the highest scores. Results from the TPQ suggest that still images helped more than text and video in vocabulary learning, that actions are better represented through videos than through still images, and that more attention is paid to narration in group TN than in groups TNV and TNI. © 2014 PUCV, Chile.