Exploring the most effective modality to present online material to language students

Abstract

This study seeks to identify the most effective way to present online content to language learners with the aim of maximising learning benefits and engagement. As teachers are the gatekeepers of content, we believe it is fundamental to understand how they, as well as learners, perceive the different modalities in which it is presented. This paper will present the preliminary results from a pilot study with learners of Spanish as a Foreign Language (FL) in Hong Kong and trainee teachers in Spain. The project has developed a FL online course to test different ways of presenting information to learners using a combination of modalities. The focus of the course is the marker "se", a specific linguistic unit that is seldom taught explicitly in the classroom but that occurs frequently in both the written and spoken language, and is critical to the production and comprehension of nuanced Spanish. Our preliminary results suggest that trainee teachers prefer the video modality but consider the audio modality a novel way of presenting content. The textual modality, however, is considered as the most traditional and "boring" to learners. This is confirmed by the results from the Hong Kong learners who indicate that the audio modality was more rewarding and appealing than the textual one (the results from the video had not been received at the time of writing). These results are encouraging as they suggest an alignment of trainee teachers' perceptions and actual learner engagement despite the cultural differences between the two groups.