What Lurks in the Margin: Use of Vocabulary Glosses as a Strategy in Second Language Reading

George Martin Jacobs

56 citations0/0 files storedIssues in Applied Linguistics

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Second Language Acquisition and Learning EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning Reading and Literacy Development

Abstract

There have been inconsistent findings in previous second language research on the effect of vocabulary glossing on reading comprehension (Davis, 1989; Jacobs, Dufon, & Fong, 1994; Johnson, 1982; Pak, 1986). The present study was undertaken to extend this body of research in two ways: (a) by including another set of second language learners, another text, and another set of vocabulary glosses, accompanied by rigorous experimental procedures; and, (b) by considering the possible interaction of other variables with glossing. These other variables were: psychological type, tolerance of ambiguity, proficiency, frequency of gloss use, perceived value of gloss use, and time on task. Glossing can be situated in the context of recent work on the reading process (Eskey, 1988; Lesgold & Perfetti, 1981; Rumelhart, 1980; Stanovich, 1980) and learning strategies (Cohen, 1990; O'Malley & Chamot, 1990; Ojrford, 1990; Wenden, 1991). Glossing strengthens the bottom-up component of the reading process. The use of glossing is one of several possible repair strategies that readers can use when they recognize comprehension breakdowns. One hundred sixteen U.S. college students enrolled in a third-semester Spanish course participated in the study. They were randomly assigned to one of two conditions, with half reading an unglossed Spanish text and half reading the same text accompanied by English glosses. After reading the text, participants were asked to write as much of the text as they could recall. Results showed a significant effect for glossing but no significant interactions between the treatment and any of the other variables. Suggestions are made as to the optimal use of vocabulary glosses.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 56 citations exist upstream.

References

1951Coefficient Alpha and the Internal Structure of Tests 1960A Coefficient of Agreement for Nominal Scales 1991Language Learning Strategies: What Every Teacher Should Know 1992Learning Strategies in Second Language Acquisition 1990Learning Strategies in Second Language Acquisition 2014An Introduction to Second Language Acquisition Research 1962Intolerance of ambiguity as a personality variable1 1967Reading: A psycholinguistic guessing game

Cited by

2003Making form-meaning connections while reading: A qualitative analysis of word processing 2010CALL-Based Versus Paper-Based Glosses 2008Hypermedia Annotation Presentation 2021Glossing and vocabulary learning 2014Hypertext glosses for foreign language reading comprehension and vocabulary acquisition: effects of assessment methods 2012VIDEOS AND ANIMATIONS FOR VOCABULARY LEARNING: A STUDY ON DIFFICULT WORDS

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.