Supporting Listening Comprehension and Vocabulary Acquisition in French with Multimedia Annotations

Abstract

English‐speaking college students enrolled in a French course listened to a 2‐minute, 20‐second historical account in French presented by a computer program. The participants were randomly assigned to one of four listening treatments: the listening text (a) with no annotations available, (b) with only written annotations available, (c) with only pictorial annotations available, and (d) with both written and pictorial annotations available. The students remembered word translations and recalled the passage better when they had selected both written and pictorial annotations while listening rather than one of these types or no annotations. In addition, effect sizes were much larger for pictorial annotations than for written annotations, especially for delayed tests. The results were consistent with Mayer's (1997, 2001) Generative Theory of Multimedia Learning and extend this theory to listening comprehension.