An Exploratory Study of Tasks & Glosses on L2 Academic Vocabulary Learning

The study studied the effects of task types and gloss languages (L1 vs. L2) on academic vocabulary acquisition of the two proficiency groups (English-major vs. Life-long Education) at both short-and long-term periods. Thirty-eight college students in Korea were randomly assigned to one of the four tasks: A reading task with L2 glosses (Involvement Index 1), a reading task with L2 glosses (Index 1), a gap-filling task with L2 glosses (Index 2), and a gap-filling task with L1 glosses (Index 2). The findings showed that there were non-significant learning gains after treatment except the English-major advanced group. Furthermore, there were no significant differences among the four experimental tasks in both groups. The theoretical and pedagogical discussions were made at the conclusion.