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Article published In:
Chinese as a Second Language (漢語教學研究—美國中文教師學會學報)
Vol. 55:3 (2020) ► pp.175–192

Multimedia learning materials for second language learners

A comparison of two kinds of videos

| Nanyang Technological University
| Soochow University
| Nanyang Technological University

As an important form of second language input, videos have been given much attention by both language teachers and SLA researchers. Second language learning videos typically come in two forms: live-action videos (with human actors in realistic settings) and animation videos. In this paper, we report on an empirical study on the relative merits of these two kinds of videos for beginning learners of Chinese. A total of 82 participants took part in this research as students in a Beginners’ Chinese Language course at a university in Singapore. Each participant attended four learning sessions, two of which being based on live-action videos and another two on animation videos. Post-tests showed that the efficacy of the two kinds of videos differed between students who had had richer community exposure to Mandarin before attending the course and students who did not have such exposure. The former group performed significantly better than the latter after attending live-video sessions. However, students in the latter group reported a preference for animation videos during the post-interviews due to the more well-controlled quality of the soundtracks (i.e., less noisy background).

Keywords: live-action video, animation videos, vocabulary learning, lip-reading
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Literature review
    • Videos and L2 language learning
    • Videos in L2 vocabulary learning
    • Live-action videos vs. Animation videos
    • Research question
  • Methods
    • Participants
    • Materials: Videos
    • Materials: Quiz questions
    • Procedure
  • Results
  • Discussion
  • Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 11 August 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/csl.20013.he
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