Abstract

Although multimodality has been addressed in the educational psychology arena, thisstudy evaluates the effects of presentation modality in the retention and transfer ofconcrete vocabulary in students of English as a second language. The participantswere 104 second year university students belonging to three groups. Group 1 (n=32)was exposed to vocabulary through on screen text and narration (Group TN); group 2(n=42) was exposed to on screen text, narration and video (Group TNV); and group 3(n=30) was presented vocabulary via on screen text, narration and still image (GroupTNI). All three groups were given a retention test (RT), a transfer test (TT), and aquestionnaire to evaluate the type of presentation (TPQ). Results indicate that in theRT there are statistically significant differences among groups (ANOVA), being theTNI group the one that retains more lexical items. In the TT, using the t-student,results show that there are significant differences between groups TNI and TN, beinggroup TNI the one with the highest scores. Results from the TPQ suggest that stillimages helped more than text and video in vocabulary learning, that actions are betterrepresented through videos than through still images, and that more attention is paidto narration in group TN than in groups TNV and TNI.