How Effective are Monolingual Vocabulary Glosses as Aids in College Level Students' Reading Comprehension? : An Experimental Pilot Study

Abstract

Marginal vocabulary glossary in EFL passages is regarded as a useful tool of EFL learners for reading comprehension by teachers. It is especially the case with reading authentic materials. But, although reading with vocabulary glossary helps learners to understand texts, it leads them to decoding centered reading. In that case, they tend to read texts for details instead of global messages. Some practitioners insist that it is important for learners to think in English even reading and that learners read passages relying on English-English dictionary or English glossary. But the few data-based studies on that kind of dictionary and English glossary have proved evidence for the effectiveness of them in reading comprehension (Davis 1989:41). So the purpose of this study is to determine how monolingual vocabulary glossary facilitates EFL reading comprehension. The things to clarify are next four points: 1) What level of learners should monolingual glossary use be introduced from? 2 ) Is there some correlation between the frequency of referring to glossaries and the level of learners' text comprehension? 3) Are the kinds of vocabulary to refer different in different vocabulary level learners, or same? 4) What extent do learners referring to some words in the glosses acquire the meaning of these words after reading? To test these questions, three kinds of tests were conducted in a month. The main findings of this study were as follows: 1) The more reading proficiency they had, they got more benefits from referring to English notes in terms of reading comprehension. 2) The glossary referring behavior in reading didn't much contribute to the acquisition of vocabularies in the text. 3) The number of referring vocabularies while reading didn't correlate with the levels of text comprehension. This study's conclusion gave us some important suggestions for reading teaching. For example, it also suggested the optimal period for introducing learners to use monolingual English glossaries effectively.