KEYWORDS

Multimedia, Listening Comprehension, Choice, Amount of Invested Mental Effort

INTRODUCTION

Listening comprehension activities provide students with the aural component of the target language to help them better hear the intricate sounds, enunciations, and content and develop their abilities to communicate with others in a target language. Educators try to help students enhance their listening skills by assigning them videotape, audiotape or computer-based activities to complete either at home or in the language lab setting. With these materials, students can practice hearing vocabulary words, sentence structures, and dialogues in the target language.

For years, educators and publishers followed a unimodal approach to listening comprehension and presented aural texts without visual or verbal/textual supportive information. Students were often frustrated by such activities (Jones Vogely, 1998) for any number of reasons including lack of prior knowledge of the topic, the comprehensibility of the speaker, the materials reviewed, the lack of visual information, or even the technological design employed. Certainly, when we utilize technology-based listening comprehension materials, our ultimate goal is to help students develop their language skills. However, if the technological design does not offer helpful comprehension aids (e.g., visual aids), then many students' preferences or needs are ignored, potentially leading to poor comprehension. Thus, when students struggle with the material or the technology used, we find that "the more they fail, the more helpless they feel, and the less effort they come to invest …" (Salomon, 1983, p. 43).

Technology and language teaching have changed in recent years. Now, second language (L2) multimedia packages developed by researchers (e.g., Larson & Bush, 1992; Otto & Pusack, 1992) and by textbook publishing companies provide students with various listening comprehension activities and the learning aids needed to process them. Researchers have also called for an increase in research on L2 listening comprehension (e.g., Cauldwell, 1996; Field, 1997; Joiner, 1997; Lynch, 1998; Mendelsohn, 1998) and an increase in research on technology to better understand how we can utilize the attributes of multimedia to enhance various aspects of language learning, including listening comprehension (e.g., Brett, 1995, 1997; Hoven, 1999; Joiner, 1997; Jones & Plass, 2002; Lynch, 1998; Meskill, 1996; Purdy, 1996; Pusack & Otto, 1997; Salaberry, 2001).

To answer these calls, this paper specifically investigates students' thoughts and opinions concerning how verbal and visual annotations in a multimedia environment can assist them in their acquisition of new vocabulary from and comprehension of an aural L2 passage. Many related studies in the past pursued a purely quantitative approach (Chun & Plass, 1996a, 1996b, 1997a; Mayer & Sims, 1994; Plass, Chun, Mayer, & Leutner, 1998). While highly pertinent, these studies left many questions unanswered concerning students' views and experiences in a multimedia environment. This paper, therefore, more closely examines the students' voices, qualitative data that can provide immeasurable and even unanticipated information concerning the design and effectiveness of multimedia tools for listening comprehension. The results establish a clearer picture of the current needs and attitudes of L2 students in a multimedia environment and clarify how developers can better design listening comprehension materials and activities to enhance students' aural comprehension and make them feel as though they are indeed learning.

To bring the qualitative perspective to light, the research strategies used for both the quantitative and qualitative components will be fully disclosed while the statistical information, more completely discussed in Jones & Plass (2002), will be summarized. Students' voices will be represented by their exact quotes,

and their remarks will be further highlighted by an appropriate literature review. It is through research such as this that we can promote change in our pedagogical and technological strategies and can find ways to facilitate students' acquisition of L2 aural skills in a multimedia environment.

METHODOLOGY

Quantitative Component

Participants and Design

The participants in this study were 171 English-speaking students enrolled in second semester beginning French at the University of Arkansas. At the time of testing, their mean estimated French GPA was 2.92 (4.0 = A, 3.0 = B, 2.0 = C, 1.0 = D, 0.0 = F).

A pretest/posttest control group (between-subject) design was employed to observe the effects of two factors—the absence or presence of verbal annotations and the absence or presence of visual annotations—on students' comprehension of the aural passage and their acquisition of vocabulary. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four treatments: the aural text (a) without access to annotations, (b) with only verbal annotations available, (c) with only visual annotations available, and (d) with both visual and verbal annotations available.

Dependent Measures and Scoring

The effects of the four aural treatments on students' comprehension and vocabulary acquisition were measured using an immediate multiple-choice vocabulary posttest and an immediate recall protocol posttest (dependent measures) then again, as delayed tests, 3 weeks later. The multiple choice vocabulary posttest was made up of 25 of the 27 keywords visible on the five computer screens of each treatment. The keywords were selected from the aural passage because of their importance in the text and because they could be represented in both a visual and a text-based format. Using the split-half reliability method, the internal consistency of the vocabulary test was .82.

The recall protocol comprehension test instructed students to summarize, in English, the aural passage they listened to. Two French professors chose the 63 propositions that represented the idea units of the passage. The test was scored based on the number of correct propositions given by each student, up to a maximum of 63 points. The interrater reliability of this measure was .97.

Materials

The listening comprehension software was developed using Adobe Premiere 4.2 and Authorware 4.0. The apparatus for presenting the materials consisted of a 22-station Macintosh computer language lab, arranged such that students could view only their own computer screen.

The computer-based materials presented a 2 min 20 sec aural reading of an authentic encounter between LaSalle and the Quapaw Indians in 1682 (Buzhardt & Hawthorne, 1993; see Appendix). This historic text was chosen because of its rich visual depiction of the encounter and its unavailability in English. It was digitally recorded using the voice of a female native French speaker.

Each treatment began with an introductory screen that placed the historical event in context (advance organizer) and instructed students on how to use the program. The five separate screens that followed contained a total of 27 keywords, positioned on the left side of the screen, accompanied by ellipses to indicate missing words and thus to emulate the flow of the dialogue. Audio play buttons were positioned to the left of each text segment such that students could have equally available access to the predivided syntactic chunks of the passage (Meskill, 1996; O'Malley, Chamot, & Küpper, 1989). An icon of a speaker was present on each screen so that students could drag a keyword to it to hear the word pronounced.