Language learning and technology

"To gloss or not to gloss": An investigation of reading comprehension online.
Language Learning & Technology, Vol. 1, No. 2.


Summary.

The author of this article, talks about the use of glosses in order to improve reading comprehension online and her opinion is supported by other authors who claim that gloss provides a brief definition of some words in order to facilitate reading and comprehension processes for second language learner. In this article, some authors define gloss as “short definitions” (Nation 1983) and Pak (1986) refers to them as “explanations of the meanings of words”.
The author of the article, Lara L. Lomicka, says that online glosses can be found in the form of video, sound, or pictures. Icons, a type of picture, have also been used as glosses in order to help readers to understand the text in a better way.
In this article it's also said that some authors, Stewart and Cross (1991),studied the effect of glossing on reading comprehension and retention and according to them, elaboration glosses
"clarified the texts with statements, questions, or both," while bridging glosses "combined a statement and a question and acted as a bridge between prior learning and new information" (p. 5). According to them, these first two types of glosses are designed to help the reader process the propositions of a text. The third type of gloss used by Stewart and Cross, key point and vocabulary glosses (p. 6), underscore important statements or provided brief definitions of words.


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I choose this article because when I began to study English as a foreign language the most dificult thing that I had to solve was to learn how to read and several times I found myself totally lost and it took me a lot of time to overcome this. This article is about the use of glosses as a tool for improving reading comprehension online and it is shown in this article how through technology students can improve their reading comprehension and acquire new vocabulary through images, icons and videos with and without sound.
I think that when students read a text and they don't understand some words they usually feel frustrated and they think that it is imposible for them to resolve it and the only thing they have to do is look for the unknow words in the dictionary, but this interfere in their reading comprehension because they can loss the main idea of the reading.