Abstract:

Video learning is one of main media in language learning and knowledge acquisition, but the most difficult thing for learners that is they didn't have enough vocabulary ability to watch English videos. It makes learners hard to understand the content of videos completely.

Some studies try to solve this problem by providing the word annotation with glosses for learners to help them understand the content of English videos. But given the complete explanation for each word that learners queried, it would offer them too many messages and increase their cognitive load. At here, we integrate synonym annotation into our video learning system for reducing informations and decreasing learners’ cognitive load from word annotation with glosses. We expect the synonym annotation can play an important role in increasing learners’ vocabulary and helping them learn the knowledge from English videos.

In order to analyze the effects between synonym annotation and word annotation with glosses in video learning, we design two experiments for discussing the effectiveness of vocabulary learning, content understanding and cognitive loading.

According to the experimental results, we found:
(1) Synonym annotation can increase learners’ vocabulary.
(2) Synonym annotation can reduce learners’ cognitive load effectively.
(3) Learners can understand the content of videos more easily via synonym annotation. In particular, the phenomenon is significant in the difficult videos.
(4) The results show the achievement is inversely proportional to cognitive load.

As learners watch English videos by synonym annotation which will help them understand the content, increase their vocabulary and decrease their cognitive load. Importantly, learners can increase the comprehension of difficult videos significantly and learn the knowledge from English videos effectively.

Keywords:

Video Learning, Cognitive Load, Synonym Annotation.