Vocabulary Acquisition

Vocabulary acquisition has become a vital element of second language learning, and developing a rich vocabulary illustrates a crucial role in communication (Schmitt, 2008). Furthermore, vocabulary learning is considered as one of the most ongoing and challenging tasks for a second language learner as it is a boundless and continuous process one needs to work on (Constantinescu, 2007). Discouragingly, most of the existing studies concentrate on listening, reading, writing, with very little attention to vocabulary acquisition.

In the field of linguistics, it is believed that some if not most of FL/ L2 learning vocabulary is acquired incidentally (Grass, 1999). Research has been conducted to compare the efficiency of incidental vocabulary learning

A great deal of evidence testifies to a vigorous relationship between word knowledge and reading comprehension. Vocabulary knowledge is fundamental to reading comprehension. It is difficult to understand a text without knowing what most of the words mean. Understanding and constructing a mental representation of a text depends on one‘s knowledge of a large vocabulary to decode a word meaning (Adams, 2004; Alderson, 2000, as cited in Al Ghafli, 2011). In the same vein, Stahl (2003) claimed that insufficient word knowledge and limited vocabulary size may hinder students from understanding a text: if the text contains high-frequency words or words that students do not know, comprehension of the text is likely to be

With the ever growing popularity of the internet, many CALL programs, and online materials have flooded the area of language teaching and learning of vocabulary. It is the use of multimedia annotations that take the form not only of texts, but also of pictures, and videos. These types of electronic glosses have gained the attention of researchers who are working to determine whether multimedia annotations can facilitate L2 readers' vocabulary acquisition. The combination of different multimedia annotations is supported by the Cognitive Generative theory. It has been popularized by Richard E Mayer and other researchers, who contended that using a combination of multimedia annotations allows learners to construct referential connections between forms of mental representation systems : verbal written text, spoken text…) and visual (static picture, video, animation). In this process, the learner is regarded as an active learner who selects, organizes and integrates both pictorial and verbal information, (Mayer 1997,