Effects of topic interest and prior knowledgeon text recall and annotation use in readinga hypermedia text in the L2

This study investigates the effects of topic interest and prior knowledge on text recall andannotation use of second language learners engaged in reading a hypermedia text. The participantswere proficient learners of English enrolled in an undergraduate English LanguageTeaching programme. They were asked to read a hypermedia text that incorporated wordleveland topic-level annotations, and complete an immediate recall task. Participants’ interactionwith the text was recorded during the reading task. Data collection tools also included atopic interest questionnaire, a prior knowledge test, and semi-structured interviews. Resultsindicated no meaningful relationship between topic interest and prior knowledge. Moreover,topic interest had a significant main effect on text recall while prior knowledge did not. Inother words, topic interest facilitated the number of propositions recalled. Finally, a significantinteraction between topic interest and prior knowledge was found in terms of access toannotations. When topic interest was low, the participants with low prior knowledge utilizedcontent-related annotations more frequently than those with high prior knowledge. On theother hand, when topic interest was high, the participants with high prior knowledge accessedcontent-related annotations more frequently than those with low prior knowledge