O n f e r e n c e

Aim of the study 
Taking into consideration these discussions, this study examines what factors have greater 
influence on successful L2 vocabulary learning with technologically-enhanced visual glosses.
With special attention to English prepostions, we examine several variants: still images or 
animated images, analytic cognitive style or holistic cognitive style, and Japanese learners 
or Chinese learners. Our research questions are as follows: 

If learners use technolgically-advanced animated glosses in comprehending the 
semantic network of the prepositions, will the glosses enhance their appropriate use 
of the senses in reading and writing?

If learners have holistic cognitive learning style, will the use of the technologically-
advanced animated glosses facilitate their appropriate use of the senses in reading 
and writing?

If learners’ first langauge is Chinese, will the use of the technologically
-advanced 
animated glosses facilitate their appropriate use of the senses in reading and 
writing?
Research design 
The participants of the study are divided into two groups according to the results of the 
Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ) (Marks, 1973), which is widely used as a 
measure of individual imagery ability. The control group consists of the participants with 
lower VVIQ scores, while the experimental group consists of those with higher VVIQ scores. 
The people in the control group, we hypothesize, are “verbalizers” with an
alytic cognitive 
styles and those in the experimental group are “imagers” with holistic cognitive styles. Each 
group contains both Japanese and Taiwanese learners of English.
They use the still visual glosses and animated visual glosses of three English prepositions: 
above, on and over, each of which has the same translation in both Japanese ‘no ue ni 
(located at an upper surface)’ and Chinese ‘zai … shangmian’. Then vocabulary tests, a 
reading comprehension test and a writing test will be conducted to examine which group 
can get better results with the use of the glosses. Collecting and analyzing the data, we will 
examine the impact on the learning cognitive styles for successful use of visual glosses 
together with the influence of the learners’ L1. We 
have not conducted the research yet, 
the findings will be shown at the conference.