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English-speaking college students who were enrolled in a German course read a 762-word German language story presented by a computer program. For key words in the story, students could choose to see a translation on the screen in English (i.e., verbal annotation) or view a picture or video clip representing the word (i.e,, visual annotation), or both. Students remembered word translations better when they had selected both visual and verbal annotations during learning than only 1 or no annotation; students comprehended the story better when they had the opportunity to receive their preferred mode of annotation. Results are consistent with a generative theory of multimedia learning that assumes that learners actively select relevant verbal and visual information, organize the information into coherent mental representations, and integrate these newly constructed visual and verbal representations with one another. Current developments in information technologies have resulted in rapid advances in the application of instructional and educational technology. There seem to be, however, only small advances in corresponding basic research on the psychological principles of human learning in a multimedia learning environment (Kozma, 1991). This article deals with two of these psychological principles. On the one hand, multimedia learning requires the learner to process information presented in different modes (e.g., in a verbal and a visual mode). Thus, cognitive psychological theories on processing information such as Mayer's (1997) generative theory of multimedia learning are relevant. On the other hand, the term learning environment points to

This article offers a capacious view of technology to suggest broad principles relating technology and language use, language teaching, and language learning. The first part of the article considers some of the ways that technological media influence contexts and forms of expression and communication. In the second part, a set of heuristic questions is proposed to help guide language teachers and researchers in determining how to incorporate technology into their teaching practice or research agenda and evaluate its suitability and impact. These questions are based primarily on the goal of helping learners to pay critical attention to the culturally encoded connections among forms, contexts, meanings, and ideologies that they will encounter and produce in different mediums, both traditional and new.

Research on second language (L2) vocabulary acquisition has revealed that words associated with actual objects or imagery techniques are learned more easily than those without. With multimedia applications, it is possible to provide, in addition to traditional definitions of words, different types of information, such as pictures and videos. Thus, one of the fundamental research questions posed in the use of multimedia systems is: How effective are annotations with different media types for vocabulary acquisition? This article discusses the results of three studies done with 160 university German students using C'berBuch, a hypermedia application for reading German texts that contains a variety of annotations for words in the form of text, pictures, and video. The issues examined are related to (a) how well vocabulary is learned incidentally when the goal is reading comprehension, (b) the effectiveness of different types of annotations for vocabulary acquisition, and (c) the relationship between look-up behavior and performance on vocabulary tests. The results showed a higher rate of incidental learning than expected (25% accuracy on production tests, 77% on recognition tests), significantly higher scores for words that were annotated with pictures + text than for those with video + text or text only, and a correlation between looking up a certain annotation type and using this type as the retrieval cue for remembering words.