Abstract
This thesis describes the development of a piece of courseware “Thanksgiving,” and the study of vocabulary annotations. The courseware introduces the origin and three related symbols of the western holiday, Thanksgiving. Instructional and learner analyses were conducted before the actual development of the courseware. The steps in developing the courseware were (1) the selection of authoring tool and setting up framework and modules, (2) the collection of information and adding it the body of text, (3) the design of vocabulary annotation, and (4) the addition of the second main unit “Relevant Vocabulary”. A formative evaluation and follow up revision were undertaken before the study of the effectiveness of vocabulary annotation. The study aims to investigate the effectiveness of three types of vocabulary annotations on vocabulary learning and whether perceptual learning styles influence vocabulary learning as well. The three types of annotations were text annotation only, text plus picture, as well as text plus picture plus sounds. The participants in this study were 82 freshmen in a national university in the spring of 2000. They answered the questionnaire for perceptual learning styles, and took the pre-test in the first stage. Then they viewed Thanksgiving individually. Finally, they took the post-test, answered the questionnaire about the design of the courseware, and some interview questions. The result showed that the version with text plus picture was the most effective. The comparingly lower effectiveness of thauditory annotation might be attributed to the influence of the participants’ mother tongue and the high speaking speed of auditory annotation. The participants were grouped into five categories of perceptual learning styles—auditory (A), visual (V), visual/nonverbal (V/N), visual/verbal (V/V), and mixed (AVN). Perceptual learning styles seemed not to have significant influence on the effectiveness of vocabulary annotation types of vocabulary learning.