EFL University Students’ Reading Comprehension through Multimedia Annotation and Writing Summary

The present study aimed to explore how multimedia annotation and writing summary influence the level of reading comprehension. Annotation is based on the theoretical framework of attention, which maintains that attention is critical in the acquisition process of an L2 (Robinson, 1995; Schmidt, 1995, 2001). In fact, several studies (Bowles, 2004; Chun & Plass, 1996; Jones, 2004; Jones & Plass, 2002; Lomicka, 1998; Nagata, 1999) have been done to investigate the relationships between annotation and vocabulary acquisition, instead of beginning with the perspective of the structure and organization of the text. Moreover, a summary is a shortened version of the original text and the main purpose of such a simplification is to highlight the major points. A written summary has a clearly arranged structure and is written in a logical, chronological and traceable manner. According to Trites & McGroarty (2005), asking readers to write a summary after reading the text is a better way to assess their comprehension. However, it is still not proven that such writing summary can lead to better reading comprehension. In this way, the current study tried to probe the EFL university students’ reading comprehension through online annotation and writing summary from the perspective of the organization of the text. One hundred non-English majors were invited to join the study and all participants read the online text under one of four conditions: no treatment, multimedia annotation, writing summary, and both of the two treatments. Results of quantitative analysis revealed that participants demonstrated better reading comprehension with the use of multimedia annotation and writing summary, while those who didn’t receive any application performed worse in the comprehension test.