The Effects of Multimedia Annotation and Summary Writing on Taiwanese EFL Students’ Reading Comprehension

The present study investigates the effects of multimedia annotation through the discourse scheme and summary writing through the grounding theory (Chang, 1997) on text comprehension. Specifically, the study focuses on examining the influences of multimedia annotation from a special perspective, namely, the use of modified discourse scheme to trigger EFL learners’ active reading process, rather than a passive way of receiving different types of annotations. Summary writing, a newly applied means to test learners’ reading comprehension (Trites & McGroarty, 2005), is probed to see whether there exist wash back effects in assisting learners’ reading performance. One hundred Taiwanese EFL university freshmen were divided into four groups, each group receiving a different treatment within a pretest-posttest-delay post-test design. Results of ANOVA indicated that both multimedia annotation and summary writing had significant positive effects on learners’ reading performance, with obvious variances in the post and delayed post-test. Moreover, the repeated measure was applied to examine the lasting effects of the treatments. In addition, qualitative interview data relating to the participants’ ideas and attitudes are also discussed.