Abstract
Scholars suggest that not every student completely comprehends the content of a lecture in a foreign language as the medium of instruction, especially in the case of those with low language ability. To facilitate comprehension of lectures in a foreign language, learning content was presented to students in multiple modalities; that is, in addition to verbal (speech of the instructor) and visual (lecture slides) content, texts generated by speech-to-text recognition (STR) or speech-enabled language translation (SELT) were shown to the students. The goal was to compare how these two additional content modalities (i.e., STR-texts vs. SELT-texts) facilitate student comprehension of lecture content. Because processing multimodal content requires additional cognitive resources, another goal was to explore whether STR-texts versus SELT-texts impose any cognitive load on the students. To this end, two groups of students were recruited, where they attended two lectures at the intermediate and advanced levels. STR-texts were shown to a control group, and SELT-texts were shown to an experimental group. The posttest results and the cognitive load of the students in both groups after each lecture were compared. Four main findings were obtained: (a) The experimental group outperformed the control group on both posttests. However, when student language ability was considered, the difference was statistically significant for low ability students only; (b) there was not a significant between-group difference in cognitive load; however, if student language ability was considered, a significant between-group difference existed during the more difficult lecture; (c) between-group differences in self-efficacy were statistically insignificant; and (d) associations among some research variables were found. Based on these results, several implications were drawn for the teaching and research community.
Highlights
Because modern society has become globalized, nowadays, it is usual that institutions host international academic events and participants interact in a commonly used foreign language at the events. Li et al (2018) argued that not every participant of such academic events fully understands the communicated content
The results showed a significant difference between two groups on the Posttest 2 scores, t = −2.098, p < .05. This result shows that the experimental groups obtained higher scores on the Posttest 2 as compared with their counterparts. These results demonstrate that speechenabled language translation (SELT)-texts do have better effects on learning achievement than speech-to-text recognition (STR)-texts
Selfefficacy load during Lecture 1 (r = .407, p < .05), language ability and mental effort during Lecture 1 (r = .497, p < .05), and language ability and self-efficacy (r = .362, p < .05). These results suggest that high English language ability (HELA) students had a higher cognitive load and exerted more mental effort and that, low English language ability (LELA) students had a lower cognitive load
Summary
Because modern society has become globalized, nowadays, it is usual that institutions host international academic events and participants interact in a commonly used foreign language (such as English) at the events. Li et al (2018) argued that not every participant of such academic events fully understands the communicated content. In foreign language as a medium of instruction (FLMI), it synchronously generates texts from speech that are displayed to students (Rosell-Aguilar, 2017; Shadiev et al, 2014). It is possible that communication content at academic events can be hard to understand for some students (e.g., those with low foreign language ability) because speech and texts generated by STR are in a target foreign language. This issue is addressed in the present study. The feasibility of using SELT during lectures in an FLMI to facilitate comprehension of communication content and to manage the cognitive load of listeners was tested
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
