Instructor accents in online education and their effect on learning and attitudes

Abstract

Reductions in perceptual fluency have been shown to negatively impact attitudes towards learning material, but not learning itself. The current study extends this work to spoken presentations and examines whether the presence of a foreign accent negatively affects learners' experience in an online learning environment. Results indicate that the presence of an instructor accent, consistent with prior work on perceptual fluency, does not impact learning, but does cause learners to rate the instructor as less effective. Further, for those who received accented presentations, changes in participants' attitudes towards both the content area and online instruction were not predicted by learning, but instead their attitude towards the instructor. This suggests that learners in online learning environments with accented narration are potentially miscalibrated, and these biases in judgement could be inappropriately linked to a specific instructor, rather than their success of learning in the field.

Processing Fluency in Education: How Metacognitive Feelings Shape Learning, Belief Formation, and Affect

“…Recent research extended this effect to attitudes toward an instructor in an online learning environment where instructors with accented speech were judged more negatively despite the fact that learning outcomes for students did not differ between instructors with and without accent (Sanchez & Khan, 2016).…”

Instructor Fluency Correlates with Students’ Ratings of Their Learning and Their Instructor in an Actual Course

“…Research examining the effects of instructor fluency rather than perceptual fluency has utilized more realistic variations in students' experience of fluency, but the setting has remained artificial (i.e., very short instructional videos with no extrinsic investment on the part of the participants; e.g., Carpenter et al, 2013;Carpenter et al, 2016;Sanchez & Khan, 2016; but see Williams & Ceci, 1997). To this end, the purpose of the present study was to determine whether instructor fluency is related to students' evaluations of their learning in an actual course, much as occurs in more contrived laboratory experiments that have examined this question (e.g., Carpenter et al, 2013;Carpenter et al, 2016;Sanchez & Khan, 2016). We found that students' ratings of instructor fluency were correlated with their judgments of learning, various ratings of their instructor, and various ratings of the course and its topics.…”

“…Although the experience of fluency in learning situations correlates with a sense (or the explicit judgment) that information has been easily acquired, it is not always correlated with actual learning (e.g., Bertsch, Pesta, Wiscott, & McDaniel, 2007;Bjork, 1994;Carpenter et al, 2013;Carpenter, Mickes, Rahman, & Fernandez, 2016;Eitel, Kuhl, Scheiter, & Gerjets, 2014;Hirshman & Bjork, 1988;Leutner, Leopold, & Sumfleth, 2009;Rhodes & Castel, 2008;Sanchez & Khan, 2016;Slamecka & Graf, 1978;Yue, Castel, & Bjork, 2013). For this reason, if students base metacognitive evaluations of their learning on how fluently or easily they processed learning materials-but that experience of fluency is not correlated with their actual learning-then their self-assessments of their learning will be inaccurate.…”

“…Instructor fluency did not affect participants' learning (test performance) from the videos, but it did affect their judgments: participants who viewed the fluent version judged their learning to be higher and judged the instructor to be better than did those who viewed the disfluent version, even though the lesson content and actual learning did not differ by fluency. Similarly, Sanchez & Khan (2016) examined participants' learning and judgments of learning for an online lesson (five minutes in length) narrated by an instructor who was either a Native English speaker or a non-native English speaker with a Mandarin Chinese accent. Much as in Carpenter et al's (2013) experiments, although participants scored the same on a post-test regardless of which instructor narrated the lesson (indicating equivalent learning), participants in those experiments judged that they learned more from the Native English instructor than from the instructor with the accent, and also judged that the Native English instructor was a better teacher than was the instructor with the accent.…”

Second language comprehensibility as a dynamic construct

“…Such speakers were ascribed negative emotions of annoyance and irritation and labelled less intelligent and successful (Dragojevic et al, 2017). Similarly, in a study focusing on online learning, when students evaluated an instructional video narrated by the instructor who was hard to understand, they downgraded the instructor in their evaluations, expressing negative attitudes towards online coursework and evaluating video content as more difficult, even though students' actual understanding of the video was not compromised (Sanchez & Khan, 2016). In fact, a comprehensibility scale akin to that used in L2 speech research has now been validated as part of a five-item processing fluency measure, and this measure appears to explain various human judgments (truthfulness, preference, perceived risk), all attributed to processing fluency in prior literature (Graf et al, 2018).…”