Thursday, May 2, 2013

Cognitive principles vs. learner styles


Today's class was informative and interesting as usual, and we also got hands-on experience of creating online listening test in lab by using really neat and handy tools like tubechop and Google-forms. In addition, during the lecture, we had discussion focusing on the use of technology in improving reading and listening skills. One of my fellow classmates mentioned about the effect of different combination of multi-media input on L2 reading comprehension, which reminded me of an article I had read before about a study on cognitive principles of multi-media learning. The study found that students learned better when visual and verbal materials were physically close and when verbal input was presented auditorily as speech rather than visually as text ( Moreno & Mayer, 1999). Although the article was written more than a decade ago and the study did not target L2 learning, I believe it is still relevant to today's discussion. However, I was wondering whether the findings would still be the same if learners' different learning styles had been taken into account. After all, we know that the effect of the same material might vary greatly among learners with auditory, visual, or kinesthetic styles.

Moreno, R., & Mayer, R. E. (1999). Cognitive principles of multimedia learning: the role of modality and contiguity. Journal of Educational Psychology, 91(2), 358-368.

No comments:

Post a Comment