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Interactive Video Listening Comprehension in Foreign Language Instruction:
Development and Evaluation
Purpose
According to recent research, the ability to understand a foreign language in its spoken form leads to proficiency in speaking and writing that language. Listening comprehension is now widely believed to be the primary mechanism by which learners acquire competency in foreign languages.
During the last two decades, computer-assisted language learning has played an increasing role in foreign language instruction. Especially where listening comprehension is concerned, highly individualized interactive videodisc programs offer important pedagogical advantages over traditional audio approaches. The computer—a patient tutor ever at the student's beck and call—permits instant and repeated access to precisely defined video sequences that focus attention on specific linguistic features and supports the student's progress by comprehension checks and a wide array of other pedagogical features.
Such programs are rare, however, and on the whole computer instruction has failed to reach its full potential in the foreign language classroom. Most generic computer programs offer little more than simple drills that match neither the instructor's nor the students' needs. Unfortunately, many foreign language faculty lack both the expertise to write computer programs and the time in which to learn to do so.
Authoring systems, by eliminating the need to program the computer, allow faculty to develop multimedia lessons which focus on listening comprehension and match their—and their students'—specific requirements. This was the goal that project faculty set for themselves when they created Libra.
Innovative Features
Available in both Macintosh and IBM-compatible versions, Libra consists of a series of templates for basic expository displays, various question formats with feedback, and help features such as scripts and dictionaries. It allows the creation of multimedia controls, dialog boxes, hyperactive texts, response-sensitive lesson controls, links to graphics, digitized audio and video, and World Wide Web documents. At all times during the development of a lesson the author sees exactly what the student will see. Each authoring tool is designed to enable faculty to assemble lessons which model appropriate listening comprehension strategies and guide students in their use.
Research shows that presenting certain kinds of information (known as "advance organizers") concerning the story that students are about to view helps them to construct a meaningful mental representation of the text. Thus, Libra's text tools allow displays which introduce the story and its setting. Schematic displays of pictorial cues reveal the narrative structure of the text and help students to relate the text's components to each other to form a coherent overview of the story. Icon buttons representing the events in the text can be arranged in patterns reflecting the text's narrative structure. And authors can construct text maps which portray linear plot progressions, causal chains, and other narrative structures.
Effective advance organizers underscore key information in the story and prepare students for expressions that may be difficult to understand. Libra can create hyperactive text displays linked to explanatory devices such as videodisc events or digitized audio files. Students click the underlined expressions and hear them as they are spoken in the video scene, replaying them as needed.
According to the findings of linguistic research, individuals skilled in comprehension use flexible strategies at several levels of text processing. Libra allows faculty to direct students both to developing their general understanding of the text and to processing specific information from it through five kinds of comprehension checks that verify students' understanding of general as well as specific information.
Libra offers a number of help features. For students who have difficulty identifying relevant sentence constituents, the system's ancillary stacks contain templates to develop displays which provide a progressive buildup of a complex sentence, accent its important components, and show their interrelationships. Hyperlinked words or expressions offer additional help displays.
The ancillary stacks also allow creation of a help display equipped with a set of video buttons to delimit videodisc segments which contain important information. Finally, Libra's script-building tools can be used to develop written scripts of the video text.
Upon completion of the authoring system, project faculty produced and piloted three sets of multimedia lessons based on authentic video materials in French, German and Spanish. Faculty at three other institutions produced and piloted additional lessons in these languages.
Evaluation and Project Impact
Project faculty evaluated lessons developed with Libra as well as the authoring system itself. Data about the impact of Libra on learning came from French and Spanish lessons developed at four institutions, ranging from a highly selective private university to an open-admissions community college. Data were also collected on German lessons developed at Southwest Texas State, but because their design did not follow the suggested guidelines, the results did not reach statistical significance.
In one study, the performance of students using Libra-authored lessons was compared to that of peers using more traditional video and computer pedagogies. The students in the experimental groups understood significantly more of the video material, wrote higher quality free-recall protocols, and made fewer interpretation errors than their peers in the control groups.
In another study, the experimental group worked with a Libra-authored interactive videodisc while the control group viewed a linear videotape of the same narrative, supplemented by a paper replication of the computer instruction material used by the experimental group. In the last three of a series of five quizzes on listening comprehension, the experimental group outperformed the control group at a statistically significant level. The absence of a statistically significant difference between the results of the first two quizzes may have been due to some students in the experimental group not being aware initially of all the pedagogical devices in the Libra-authored lessons.
In a similar test at another institution, the experimental group consistently outperformed the controls. Two other tests of improvement of listening comprehension (conducted without controls) showed that comprehension increased by 73 percent and 86 percent after using the Libra lessons.
All students surveyed stated that they enjoyed using the Libra-authored lessons, and more than three-quarters believed that the lessons had helped them to improve their listening comprehension. A pre-post comparison of attitudes toward using the technology shows a strong positive shift, with over half the students selecting the highest rating on a five-point scale and describing themselves as "enthusiastic" about the lessons after having used them. Students using linear videotape showed much less change in their attitude.
The authoring system itself was evaluated by means of a written questionnaire administered to 60 foreign language educators trained by project staff. The respondents ranged from graduate faculty to middle school teachers, and from computer novices to expert users. Libra received highly favorable ratings, especially on questions regarding ease of learning and using the system and the degree to which it met the individual instructor's needs (about eight on a ten-point scale).
Lessons Learned
Initially project staff estimated that it would take ten hours a week over a year and a half to develop Libra. In fact, they spent a minimum of 15 hours weekly discussing, expanding and improving the system. But they believe that this careful work in the early stages was crucial to the system's success.
Project Continuation
Libra continues to be used at Southwest Texas State, and project faculty have developed over 50 lessons in French but few in German or Spanish.
Dissemination and Recognition
An article entitled "The Instructional Basis of Libra" appeared in the Journal of Language Learning Technologies. Project staff demonstrated the system at meetings of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, the Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium, the South Central Association of Learning Laboratories, and the South Central Modern Language Association. They continue to offer authoring workshops to faculty at academic institutions and professional meetings across the country. Two hundred-fifty faculty have purchased Libra.
In 1994 the university won a second grant from FIPSE to disseminate Libra to institutions across the United States. Several faculty groups participating in the dissemination workshops obtained up to $70,000 in local funding to continue their work.
Recently the project obtained a third grant of $430,000 from the U.S. Department of Education's International Education Office to continue this work and extend it to reading comprehension.
Available Information
Additional information is available from:
Robert Fischer
Department of Modern Languages
Southwest Texas State University
601 University Drive
San Marcos, TX 78666
Telephone: 512-245-2360
[Seton Hall Univ.] [Table of Contents] [Tufts Univ.]
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