| dc.description.abstract | With the advancement of technology and development of information, the world has become a global village. As competition intensifies, it is not enough for one to be able to speak only his mother tongue if he is to increase his competitiveness. Therefore, the ability to learn a foreign language has become an important tool for cultivating competitive ability. However, in the vocational high schools in Taiwan, the desire among the students to learn English remains pervasively low, which has led to poor learning results and lower English proficiency as teachers become very frustrated. To improve English learning effectiveness, reading and vocabulary power are the two keys. Especially the vocabulary forms the basis of a language and is the most important for language learning. However, vocabulary learning is boring and difficult in many cases. For this reason, this study develops a multimedia annotation search platform and creates the two learning methods of ＂video search＂ and ＂search annotated content provided by teachers and peers＂, providing learners with self-regulated learning possibilities. This system allows the learners to learn vocabulary through the movies, content annotated by the teacher and peers without peer pressure and base on their English level, and Google Translate and Dictionary links and mutual assessment of peer-annotated content, etc. They can learn words in a quick and easy and interesting way to find the correct vocabulary definition. As a result, the motivation to learn will be boosted and the memory and comprehension of vocabulary will be strengthened.
The subjects this study came from two first-grader classes of a national vocational high school with a total of 75 girls for a four-week experiment. Different learning methods were applied during the experiment period in order to observe the differences in the effectiveness of these methods on the learners and further explore the relevance between the learning behavior and learning outcomes of the experimental group.
The results showed that the experimental group was significantly better than the control group in English tests, and amount of annotated words after receiving the intervention of the two English learning methods after the test scores and the low achievers had more vocabulary annotation than the high achieving learners after the intervention and the more vocabulary annotation ensued more significant progress in the academic performance. However, the low-achieving learners still had lower grades than the high-achieving ones. Most of the subjects in the experimental group considered the multimedia annotation platform to be easy to use and fun; repeatable based on personal progress without worrying about keeping up with the peers’ learning progress; improving the learners’ concentration in the learning process; deepening the learners’ explanation and memory of words; enhancing the learners′ confidence and motivation. It is thus inferred that this search study system can effectively increase the vocabulary of the vocational high students and is helpful in uplifting the learning motivation and English proficiency of the learners.
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