Toevoeging Van Spraak Aan Schrift

Abstract

In a study encompassing 103 students in the sixth grade of the Dutch primary educational system, the effect of written text in combination with spoken text in a digital educational application on young readers is examined. The central question is whether the combination of these two information channels supports automatisation of the reading process of young readers so that it improves text comprehension or whether it causes overloading of the verbal channel. Two versions of the digital educational application WebQuests were used in this research. One version consisted of written texts accompanied by identical spoken texts; the other consisted of written texts only. To each version, half of the participants were randomly subscribed. The texts were informative of nature and their theme was 'the medieval city'. Textual open and multiple choice questions are used to measure text comprehension. The experiment shows that text comprehension of different types of young readers did not show any significant differences between the two versions of presentation. This implies that the study did not find any proof that addition of speech causes an overload of the verbal channel. Neither does it retrieve any significant evidence that it yields a surplus value to the automatisation of the reading process of young readers in digital educational applications.