Graphics and Listening Comprehension

Abstract

How effective are graphics as lecture comprehension supportsfor low-proficiency ESL listeners? In an experiment conducted with 103 college-level Asian students, agroup that heard an audiotape while looking at a page with an organizational graphic performed better on a comprehension test than a control group (no words or graphics provided), whereas the participants in two vocabulary conditions (one with vocabulary from the lecture listed in alphabetical order and the other with vocabulary listed in the order in which the words occurred in the text of the mini-lectures) performed no better than the control group. The findings indicate that the graphics enhanced listening comprehension. Suggestions for using graphics to teach academic listening skills are provided.Lecture listening skills are generally recognized as important for student success in academic environments (Dunkel, 1991;Mendelsohn, 1994;Powers, 1986). Yet the mental effort required can leave second-language learners overloaded, frustrated, and demoralized (Eastman, 1991;Snow, 1993;Ur, 1984). According to Geddes and White (1978), students often try to focus equally on all parts of a discourse. Unable to attend to everything with equal intensity, they may give up even when they could have grasped the gist of the message. College-bound students expect materials to be relevant to their academic goals and to be pitched at an appropriate level of cognitive maturity.In their study of Taiwanese college students, Chiang and Dunkel (1992) pointed out that there is no research on the needs of students at lower levels of listening proficiency with respect to the comprehension of lecture discourse. They acknowledged that lectures are extremely difficult for these students and recommended they be given short lectures on familiar topics and written versions of lectures in the prelistening stage.As an increasing number of Asian students enter college and university programs in North America, there is a growing need to modify content instruction to accommodate the needs of these learners (Brinton, Snow, & Wesche, 1989;Christianson, 1995). In this article I attempt to explore how graphics can facilitate the second-language lecture comprehension process.The importance of comprehensible input as a necessary (although insufficient) factor in L2 language learning is well documented in the SLA literature. Krashen (1982) argued that the most effective way to teach a second language is to give learners large amounts of comprehensible input in an environment of low anxiety. Krashen's views on comprehensible input have TESL CANADA JOURNAULA REVUE TESL DU CANADA VOL. 14, NO.1, WINTER 1996 45"sparked interest in comprehension-based methodologies and materials" and have led "an increasing number of scholars and practitioners to believe that comprehension processes and strategies need to be taught actively in second language classrooms" (Omaggio-Hadley, 1993, p. 163).Because meaning is inferred from and understood in context (Brown, 1987;Garrod, 1986), it is not surprising that con...

A comparative study of video presentation modes in relation to L2 listening success

“…However, when the visual component in the fictional narrative is presented prior to the audio component, learners are likely to experience difficulty building connections between the mental representations of the verbal information and the pictorial information, causing decreased video comprehension. Despite the higher negative value of the V→A Group for effective video presentation mode, Table 3 shows that the attitude survey findings support previous studies on the facilitative role of visual support in listening comprehension (Baltova, 1994;Ginther, 2002;Guillory, 1998;Jones & Plass, 2002;Kashani et al, 2011;Mueller, 1980;Ruhe, 1996;Sueyoshi & Hardison, 2005;Teng, 1994;Wagner, 2010Wagner, , 2013. Pictorial information, when combined with verbal stimuli, motivates and interests listeners and provides rich contextual cues and specific reference points for their attention (Wright, 1989).…”

“…The results obtained from the less proficient students suggested that the visual in the Visual Before group served as an advance organiser, leading students to formulate fewer incorrect hypotheses regarding the subsequent listening text; the visual also heightened their interest and caught their attention. Ruhe (1996) examined the relative importance of graphics to the listening comprehension of ESL learners at a low level of proficiency. The findings support the positive role of organisational graphics in enhancing the listening comprehension of Asian students in Canada.…”

Assessing Listening Abilities

“…In the teaching of listening comprehension nowadays, a good deal of emphasis is given to the importance of providing adequate visual support to learners so as to enable them to activate their content schemata and to assist them in making predictions and inferences when a text has only been partially understood (Kang 1995, MacWilliam 1986, Mueller 1980, Ruhe 1996. However, although video has been widely used for this purpose in language teaching, videomediated language testing remains relatively unexplored.…”

A comparison of video- and audio-mediated listening tests with many-facet Rasch modeling and differential distractor functioning

“…In recent years, as the price of quality video production equipment has fallen, the use of video in tests of foreign language listening comprehension has become much more feasible for more institutions and test designers, prompting an increase in research on the topic. Informing these studies is a wealth of psychological research illustrating the importance of nonverbal signals to human communication (for an overview, see Burgoon, 1994), as well as published research on the effect of visuals on listening and comprehension in general, from the use of supplementary still graphics (Ginther, 2002; Ruhe, 1996) to the impact of nonverbal cues and gestures (Kellerman, 1992; Riseborough, 1981; Sueyoshi & Hardison, 2005). The majority of this work supports the conclusion that the inclusion of nonverbal information with a stream of aural language enhances comprehension and recall.…”