It seems necessary to evaluate the effectiveness of these tools from various perspectives of psycholinguistics and applied linguistics, particularly when it comes to learning a foreign or second language (L2), given the very current trends in digital language education that are generally supported by governments and educational institutions. As a result, the purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast print text and digital media in terms of vocabulary retention in L2. The study involved 122 university students who were divided into two groups to learn 60 brand-new phrasal verbs; One group used text from a standard printout, while the other group used the same text on their digital devices with annotations. After four weeks of studying the four sets of phrasal verbs, or 15 verbs per week, there were two memory tests. Another test was given after another month to see how well the students remembered the vocabulary. The groups that used print text in both of the tests clearly outperformed the other, albeit only by a small margin. According to the findings of this study, students are more likely to retain L2 vocabulary when they can make notes, highlight, or write their translations in their native language and have access to printed vocabulary. However, in order to obtain data that is more trustworthy, these findings ought to be checked out from various other points of view as well.
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