Articles:Supporting Visual and Verbal Learning Preferences in a Second-Language Multimedia Learning Environment

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Contents

Question

  • Do visualizers and verbalizers differ in their behavior in a multimedia learning environment?
  • How can we support the different needs of visualizers and verbalizers to improve their overall learning outcomes?
  • "For whom is multimedia instruction effective?"

Levels of Learning Focus

This article focuses on:

  • rote learning: acquisition of single vocabulary items
  • constructive learning: comprehension of the basic events in a text.

generative theory of multimedia learning

generative theory of multimedia learning, which posits that learners engage in three major processes—selecting, organizing, and integrating when they are presented with visual and verbal information such as illustrations and text.

  1. Selecting the content:
    • Text: the learner must select relevant words to be retained as a text base in verbal working memory
    • Image: the learner must select relevant images to be retained as an image base in visual working memory.
  2. Organizing the content:
    • text base into a coherent verbal representation
    • image base into a coherent visual representation.
  3. Integration of verbal and visual representations by making one-to-one connections between features of the two representations.

According to generative theory, meaningful learning is enhanced when a learner can construct and coordinate visual and verbal representations of the same material.

Extension to Second Language Learning

areas that are targeted,

  • learning of individual vocabulary words
  • overall comprehension of a reading text.

Learning words

  • rote learning
  • In foreign language learning, word/object associations are learned more easily. (e.g., Kellogg & Howe, 1971) "In other words, students learn new words when they can establish a direct connection between a word in their native language, the corresponding picture of an object or action, and its foreign equivalent. They thus build two types of retrieval cues in memory."

Reading Comprehension

  • constructive learning
  • Mayer says that, when reading a text, "learners have to build referential connections in working memory between the mental representations of ideas or propositions that have been presented in different modes."

Hypothesis

hypothesis 1

students can build two types of retrieval cues when word annotations are presented in verbal and visual forms; in other words, they can integrate the mental representations constructed from the verbal and visual information, whereas they can only build one or no type of retrieval cue when they select annotations in one or no forms.

Result 1

As predicted, there is a strong effect of students' look-up behavior on vocabulary acquisition such that learning the translation of foreign words is best when students selected both visual and verbal modes of instruction, moderate when they selected only one mode of instruction, and worst when they selected neither. This result extends earlier work on active learning strategies by demonstrating that the combina- tion of visual and verbal learning modes results in higher performance than one mode alone.

hypothesis 2

students tend to rely on retrieval routes corresponding to their preferred learning styles, such that visual learners are more likely to benefit from annotations being presented visually and verbal learners are more likely to benefit from annotations being presented verbally.

Result 2

The results suggest that visualizers are more effective in using visual cues for remembering vocabulary information, whereas verbalizers are more effective in using verbal cues. An instructional implication is that multimedia environments that allow for both visual and verbal modes of elaborating on words may be effective because learners can choose the mode of annotation that best suits their learning preference.

hypothesis 3

visualizers are expected to recall propositions that contain words with visual and verbal annotations better than propositions that contain words with only verbal annotations. For verbalizers, this difference is expected to be smaller because they receive their preferred mode a priori.

Result 3

The major focus of our analysis was on the interaction between learning preference and annotation type used to annotate a proposition, in which visualizers performed better on propositions that allowed for visual and verbal annotations than on those that allowed only for verbal annotations, whereas verbalizers performed well on both types of propositions.

hypothesis 4

visualizers are expected to recall text proposi- tions that were additionally visually illustrated in a preview video better than propositions that were not. For verbalizers, this difference is again expected to be smaller

Result 4

The results of this analysis replicate the highly interesting Attribute X Treatment interaction effect of the previous analysis. Consistent with previous results by Mayer and Sims (1994), the results for the comprehension test reveal an interaction in which verbalizers do not profit from the addition of visual information to their preferred verbal type of information to the same extent as visualizers do. Reinterpreted from the perspective of visualizers, this means that visualizers perform worse when their preferred type of information is not available when reading and trying to comprehend a literary text.

Interesting Quotes

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