The Effects of Glossing Conventions on L2 Vocabulary Recognition and Production

To investigate the effects of different glossing conventions on vocabulary recognition and recall, 158 participants were given a pre-test to make sure that they did not have any prior knowledge of the target words. Reading passages with four different glossing conventions (interlinear, marginal, pre-text, and post-text) were given to eight groups. Four groups received interlingual glosses and four groups were given intralingual glosses. Receptive and productive post-tests were administered to measure vocabulary recognition and recall. The collected data were analyzed using two one-way ANOVA procedures. The results showed that there were no significant differences among the effects of different types of intralingual glosses on vocabulary recognition and recall. As to the affect of the interlingual glosses on vocabulary recognition, the post-text group performed significantly worse than both the pre-text and the marginal groups. Moreover, the interlinear gloss was shown to be more effective than the post-text gloss in vocabulary recall.