Redundancy in foreign language reading comprehension instruction: Concurrent written and spoken presentations

Abstract

In an example of the redundancy effect, learning is inhibited when written and spoken text containing the same information is presented simultaneously rather than in written or spoken form alone. The current research was designed to investigate whether the redundancy effect applied to reading comprehension in English as a foreign language (EFL) by comparing two instructional formats, written presentation only and written presentation concurrent with verbatim spoken presentation. Participants were in their first year of tertiary education. Examination of translation scores, subjective mental load ratings, and free recall performance indicated that simultaneous presentations rendered text comprehension less effective both at a lexical level and at the level of text comprehension compared with written presentation only.