Suh Keong Kwon


Sessions

The Impact of Presenting Videos in an L2 Listening Comprehension Test: An Eye-Tracking Study

Asynchronous-Video
Sat, Feb 20, 16:00-16:25 JST

Listening is perhaps the most hidden and inaccessible language process, which makes it hard to investigate precisely. With the introduction of an eye-tracking method in L2 research, access to L2 learners’ cognitive processes during listening comprehension has become more feasible. This study used an eye-tracking method to investigate L2 learners’ cognitive processing during a listening comprehension test where videos were presented as stimuli. Most existing eye-tracking studies looked into learners’ reading processes, particularly the cognitive efforts identified while students read a sentence-level text. Few studies have yet investigated the cognitive process of listening comprehension, particularly with the presence of visual cues provided together with the aural input. A total of 117 EFL learners completed a video-mediated listening comprehension test, and their test scores and eye-movement data were analyzed. Findings show that the candidates in the video listening condition attended to the visual cues significantly more than the stem and answer choices and performed better than the candidates in the audio-only condition. It was also found that the ways of reading the stem and answer choices were not significantly affected by the presence of the visual cues and that the candidates perceived the multimodal input as additional information. In terms of the candidates’ viewing behaviors, longer and more frequent viewing of the answer key options and the PPT slides in the academic lecture videos led to improvements in test scores, while viewing distractors or speakers showed an opposite trend. This study concludes by asserting a need for more work to be carried out on this topic since there is much more variability in listening and multimodal input compared to simple reading or writing.