‘ELT Voices - India’ International Journal for Teachers of English Volume 5, Issue 1, 25-34 (2015) ISSN: 2230-9136 (http://www.eltvoices.in) Visuals and their Effect in Listening Comprehension Shemal P. Mevada Hansaba College of Engineering and Technology, Sidhpur, Gujarat, India Sunil Shah H M Patel Institute of English Training and Research, Vallabh Vidyanagar, Gujarat, India Article reference: Mevada, S. & Shah, S. (2015). Visuals and their Effect in Listening Co mprehension. ELT Voice - India, Volume, 5 (1), 25-34. Abstract: Th is paper provides an overview of listening comprehension and types of visuals wh ich can be used in listening comprehension. It also talks about the effects of different v isuals on the result of ESL (English as a Second Language) students in listening comprehension by reviewing previous studies. Index Terms: listening comprehension, ESL. 26 Mevada & Shah (2015). Visuals and their Effect in Listening Comprehension. Introduction Among the four language skills listening comprehension is the most difficu lt to investigate, therefore the least understood in second language research (Vandergrift 2010). Listening involves not only linguistic but also non -linguistic co mplex p rocess at different levels. listening comp rehension is guage teaching, as dergrift it currently considered the most pro minent aspect of is believed to facilitate the other language skills such as speaking, reading and writing 2011). Co rrespondingly, guage want to improve Vandergrift emphasizes the productive that if skills - speaking and the learners of writ ing, they have English as la n(Va n- second la n- to understand the language input fro m receptive skills- reading and listening (2011). Currently the major function of language i.e. To use language in social context is being emphasized. In other words the focus has shifted fro m content to skill develop ment and fro m teacher-cent red to learner-cent red. Therefore listening is no longer a passive skill. However it is considered to be an interactive skill where the interlocutor is equally responsible for the message comprehensibility (Branden 2000, Hoven 1999). Definition of listening Listening has always been area of interest for an area many scholars of research and and researchers in the term listening Comprehension has remained an the field of language teaching and learning. Many scholars have tried to define the term ‘listening comprehension’ as per their expert ise. Chastain (1 971) defined listening co mprehension by emphasizing ability to understand and comprehend the speech by native speaker and that even at normal speed in part icular situation. On the other hand Saricoban (1999) goes further and in- cludes understanding speaker’s accent or pronunciation their grammar and vocabulary and the meaning conveyed. However, according to Dirven and Oakeshott-Taylor (1984) listening is a co mplex activity which not only looks at simp le linguistic elements or knowledge knowledge Dirven of of language used in language real but context and Oakeshott-Taylor (1984) that also it takes into of co mmun ication. listening is types of linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge to derive the really a account non -linguistic elements Byrnes (1984) supports the v iew co mplex skill and of and people need to use all meaning including co mprehension of words phrases, clau s- es, sentences and connected discourses. As far as the term listening comp rehension is concerned there is no ‘The’ definition as all vary to some extent. So it can be said that listeners do not confine themselves to use a particular way of understanding oral text rather they emp loy almost all knowledge to understand the oral text. Significance of listening Listening is the first language skill and co mes before speaking, reading and writ ing. Rankin (1926) investigated ho w frequently the listening skill is used by ordinary adults in their routine verbal communicat ion and he found out that 42.10% of time (1953) they spend in found that female listening; college 31.09% in speaking; students spent 42% 15% t ime in read ing o f their total and 11% in writing. Bird verbal co mmunication in lis- tening while 25% in speaking; 15% in read ing and 18% in writing. A study conducted by Barker, Edwards, Gaines, Gla dney, and Holley (1980) supported Bird’s view in listening, 17.3% in reading, 16.3 in speaking (1988), students from Kindergarten were and and showed 13.9 expected to in that college students spent 52.5% of their time writing. listen On the other hand, according to 65-90% Gilbert of their time. A historical overview of listening comprehension Listening is one of the most important skills to acquire any language in the world. The importance of listening cannot be ignored but till 1960s, in the field of language teaching the concept of listening was not focused on. Before ond World War it was a tradit ion to the Sec- focus only on reading skill and not on listening, if wanted to acquire 27 ELT Voices-India Volume 5, Issue 1, 2015 second language. And hence listening became the least understood aspect in foreign language learning (Winit z, 1981). And even the emergence of Audio Lingual method created a wall in a way of development o f listening skill. But, since the development of communicative co mpetence in language teaching and learning has been given importance, the signi ficance of ro le o f listening in the second language acquisition has been understood (Joiner, 1984; Ellis, Tanaka & Yamazaki, 1994). Technological advances in global commun ication have made listening key skill when there is a growing awareness of importance of listening in the world. A variety of co mprehension -based-methodologies have been proposed and wide range of books, articles and materials are available to assist teachers to develop listening skills o f learners (Anderson & Lynch,1988; Underwood, 1989). As the number of studies indicating the listening skill can be taught, increased remarkable changes have taken place in listening instruction over the last five decades. There has been significant change from non-teaching in the Audio-Lingual period to haphazard use of text followed by co mprehension questions and to a strategy based approach (Mendelsohn, 1998). After a long period considering listening and reading alike, listening is considered as an individual skill with its approaches in its own rights (Brown, 1990). So with changes in the listening skills it is now considered as a co mplex and active skill involving several processes (Richards, 1983). So it can b e said that listening skill has taken a long journey and a st ruggling journey as an ignored skill to an essential skill fo r language learning. So in foreign language instruction, teaching listening has become an essential part that cannot be ignored (Anderson & Lynch, 1988; Morley, 1991). In one of his researches Feyten (1991) showed that 70 percent of average adult ’s working day is spent on verbal communication, with 45 percent of that spent on listening acts. In addition to that he says listening skil l was a good predictor of language achievement and most frequent ly used mode of hu man co mmunication. Dunkel (1993) emphasizes on the importance of listening skill, development of communicative competence and oral fluency. Many other scholars (Dunkel. 1991; Rost, 1990; Vogely, 1999) insist that acquisition of listening skill should be given an assistance of rich input as a part of language material. emphasized basic in the classroom and in the One of the most considerable reasons why listening should process of language acquisition is its frequent use me as mediu m of co mmun ication as co mpared to other language skills. It was considered that listening is not only important for learning second language but also it is remarkably impo rtant to facilitate the acquisition of other language skills (Vandergrift, 1999). That is why almost all of the scholars advocate the importance of listening in language acqu i- sition and its practice in classroom for teaching and learning. As the previous researches and studies show the importance of listening in language learning and teaching, the importance of the listening cannot be underestimated (Morley, 1991). practice and introduce it in the Listening is such an important skill that classroom innovatively to help learner in learn ing leads teachers to second language (Thompson, 1996). Different views on listening comprehension Among the four language skills listening is the key language skill that is significant for the language acquisition process. As far as the listening is concern, sound is not only means of co mmunication in spoken interaction but it is acco mpanied by visual factors as well. practice of playing Therefore, as stated by Buck (2001, p.253 as cited in Ruslan, 2008), “the co mmon a disembodied recording from as audio -player does not create a very realistic listening situation”. The existing definit ions of listening comprehensions vary from each other to some extent. Lado (1961, p.206) defines listening comprehensions in earlier definit ions as, “recognition control of the signaling elements of the language in commu- 28 Mevada & Shah (2015). Visuals and their Effect in Listening Comprehension. nication situations”. Whereas later defin itions deal with the types of stimuli o r information exchanged between the speaker and listener. For instance, Coakley and Wolvin (1986, p.20) claim listening as “a co mp lex co mmun ication behaviours, involving a process of receiv ing, attending to, and assigning here as Rubin mean ing to verbal and/or nonverbal stimuli”, (1995, p.151) states that listening comprehension “consists of processing listeners gets fro m v isual and auditory clues in order to define what is going informat ion which on and what the speakers are trying to express”. Therefore it can be said that listening is a mu ltitasking process that involves not o nly auditory aspect but also visual and attention processors. However in listening co mpreh ension the information or data can be divided parts: the original message sent to the listener in two and the message understood by the listener (Chung, 1994). The message received by listener comprises three types of information namely, first oral covering words and sentences, second paralinguistic aspects covering extra speech sounds and third visuals. Apart fro m all these aspects there are many other linguistic elements that affect listening comprehe nsion like pace, schemata, tone, intonation, body language and gestures, accent and pronunciation and they all help in the process of verbal communication. (Gruba, 1997; Ockey, 2007). Types of visuals and their effects The previous researches support the idea that visuals help the listener to understand the speech, the message effectively. And visuals are also being used by almost all the language teachers to teach la nguage. On the other hand visuals always do not have positive and desired effect, sometimes they fail somewhere and play d istract ing role. Bejar et al. (2000) and Ginther (2002) identifies two types of visuals - context visuals and content visuals. Context visuals are those that help to know about the verbal exchanges wherein one can get informat ion about participants, the settings a nd the text type conveyed. Content visuals are visuals that convey content of the verbal exchange and it may include i mages, photographs, sketches, graphs, charts etc. For instance, if a teacher is talking about village life in the classroom using the pict ure of village settings, is an example of content visual. These visuals may have positive as well as adverse effect if the language learner can interpret and u nderstand the meaning then it can be said that the visual facilitate the learn ing. But if the visual distracts the learner or the in formation is overloaded then it plays an adverse role in language learning (Chung, 1994). Multimedia language learning Today in the era of technology the teacher cannot confine himself by using only chalk and talk method, it becomes very easy to exp lain difficu lt concept with the use of mu lt imedia like, text, pictures, g raphs, sounds, videos etc. The term mu lt imed ia stands for “the combination of two or more media such as text, image and sound” (Chung, 1994: 1). Whe n the new matter is presented to the students with the use of sound, pictures, videos etc., it is known as mu ltimedia learning (Mayers, 1997). ELT Voices-India Volume 5, Issue 1, 2015 29 A model proposed by Salomon (1989), exp lains textual and visual media that involves five types of variab les name ly stimulus variable, cognitive variable, personal variab le, task variables and acco mplish psychological functions. Integration of all these may help in the process of learning listening. Another theory referring to multimedia language learning was given by Mayer (1997), he tags this theory as generative theory of mult imedia learning wh ich was based on two d ifferent theories, ‘generative theory’ by Wittrock (1974) and Paivio’s (1986) ‘the dual coding theory’ respectively. The most important aspects of thes e theories were integration of visual and verbal data to comprehend text. Mayer (1997:4, as cited in Ruslan, 2008) tries to shed light on this theory in the fo llowing way: “In a generative theory of mu lt imedia learning, the learner is viewed as a knowledg e constructor who actively selects and connects pieces of visual and verbal knowledge. The basic theme of generative theory of multimedia learning is that the design of mult imedia instruction affects the degree to which learners engage in the cognitive process required for meaningful learning within the visual and verbal information processing systems”. A generative model of multimedia learning (Mayer, 1997, p. 5) The present figure represents main three processes involved in multimedia learning. It starts from selecting words and images from the input, organizing them into visual and verbal mental representation, and integrating them. To emphasize on that Mayer (1997) says that representation of data with visuals helps to lead the informat ion to th e long term memo ry rather than the short term memo ry, “the process of selecting, organizing, and integrating are mo re likely to occur when visual and verbal information is presented contiguously rather than separately” (Mayer, 1997, p.11). Research on the use of visuals in second language listening comprehension Many scholars agree that listening comprehension is a product of not only verbal input but also non -verbal aspects, as per the fact that real life listening comprehension involves words with visuals (Baltova, 1994; Progosh, 1996; Wagner, 2007). So they point out that use of visuals with the speech can support listeners to comprehend the meaning in second language listening. Some of the major points that indicate the advantages of visual input for second language listening are as follows: Visuals of situation and people provide the situational and interactional authenticity (Buck, 2001; Wagner, 2007). Paralinguistic aspects like gestures, body language, facial expressions support th e understanding of the listener (Buck, 2001; Coniam, 2001; Ockey, 2007). Visual input provides the better understanding of context and situation (Rubin, 1995). 30 Mevada & Shah (2015). Visuals and their Effect in Listening Comprehension. Visuals also help to activate listener’s background knowledge (Ockey, 2007). There are nu mber of factors that can affect result of v isuals in listening comprehension like, tasks, types of material and visual, learners, level of learners, difficulty level of tasks, and interaction of these factors (Ginther, 2002). There are number of researches that have been done to measure the effectiveness of visuals or the role of visuals in liste ning and found that visual support is related to context, paralinguistic aspects and cultural aspects (Coniam, 2001). This significant support of visual is very impo rtant in communicative approach in language learning. The visuals provide the learning experiences which are similar to the real life experiences (Secules, Herron and To masello, 1992). Discussing the benefits of video in listening, Gruba (2006, p. 79 as cited in Suvorov, 2008) asserts that “visual media may foster macrostructure development by illustrating abstract concepts in a concrete way” and “assisting in the construction of me ntal models”. Rubin (1995, p.151) argues that “appropriately selected video can be... the most facilitative environment for listening, especially at the elementary language learning stages”. The researches on the use of visuals in L2 listening comprehension have emerged over the past years however the results of these studies show the inconclusive result. So me of the studies reveal that visuals play facilitative role on the less profi- cient learners especially when they come across difficult texts (Mueller, 1980; Rubin, 1995). On the other hand, some studies reveal that visuals have little, if any, facilitative effect on the listening comprehension (Lynch, 1998). There are number of studies that have been conducted to investigate the role of visuals on second la nguage learners of French during the last decade (Jones, 2002, 2003; Chung, 1994). So me studies suggest that the use of visuals with audio format is very effective and it is proved effective in developing listening comprehension (Baltova, 1995; Chung, 1994). The use of images also supports the listening comprehension (Baltova, 1995; Chung, 1995) but the use of multip le images could distract the language learners (Chung, 1994). Brett (1997), emphasizing on the multimedia language learning, found that computer based multimedia environ ment r esulted in more effective in development of listening comprehension skills and imp roves task taker’s perfo rmance in la nguage recall tasks. According to Jones’s (2002) study that investigated the influences of visual and verbal annotations on listening co mprehension of second language students of French, students with access to both visual and verbal annotations performed better while the students with no annotations available showed lowest results on understanding the passage and learning vocabulary. Jones’s study (2002) was supported with the interviews with task takers conducted by Jones (2003) and reveal that, “qualitative evidence for a generative theory of mu ltimed ia learning that suggests that the availability and the choice of visual and verbal annotations in listening comprehension activities enhance students’ abilit ies to comprehend the material presented and to acquire vocabulary ” (Jones, 2003 p. 41). To summarize , some of the studies reveal that visuals play facilitative role whereas some distracting, so result is inconclusive. So most of the L2 listening researchers call for more studies to understand the role of v isuals in listening comprehe nsion. Research on the use of visuals in Second language listening tests There are several studies available on investigating the use of visuals in listening tests (e.g. Coniam; Ginther, 2002; Ockey, 2007) but there are less number of researches comparing the effect of v isuals on the task taker’s performance specifically in ELT Voices-India Volume 5, Issue 1, 2015 31 two types of tests, audio only and audio with visuals. Therefore considering the situation researchers call for mo re co mparative studies on audio only and audio with visual to find out the effect of visuals on task takers’ performance in listening tests (Buck, 2001). Buck (2001, pp. 253-254 as cited in Suvorov) also identifies the things to be taken care wh ile designing the listening tests: ...when testing language ability, the emphasis needs to be on processing linguistic information, not visual info rmat ion. Furthermo re, it seems sensible to bear in mind that adding visual information is probably only worthwhile if it provides us with better assessment of the listening construct. In some cases the visual informat ion may serve to increase the cognitive load of the test-taker, and that may interfere with the testing process. Some of the researchers thought that all the listening tests will be co mputer based tests as they include some sort of visuals aid (Ockey, 2007). One co mparative study conducted by Coniam (1999) to find out if there was any major difference b etween two modes of tests, pen and paper tests and computer based tests, very surprisingly he found that computer based tests found less reliable as task takers respond to them less favorably. Emphasizing the use of visuals in computer based listening tests Ockey (2007) argues that listening test should have some sort of visual as major target language use in real world have some sort of vis uals and it becomes quite d ifficult for task takers to stare at the screen and answer the questions. Gruba (1997) point outs four re asons for using video in listening tests, first, as we always have visuals with words in real life situation, using visual in listening tests is theory driven and it f ollows the models of listening comprehension. Second, the use of video in listening assessment is pedagogy related since language instructors always incorporate visual aids in their teaching for a nu mber of pedagogical re asons. Third, the visuals should be used in the listening tests because it contains meaning in the form of settings and situ ations. Finally, the fourth reason for using video media in the listening assessment is justified by their existing use in distance learning programs. There can be five modes of listening tests - audio only format, context images, context video, content images and content video. The outcome in the form of responses always depends on the type of input, it depends on the input that how task takers take sound with visual, and therefore result differs from each other’s. The results of the existing studies on measuring the effectiveness of visuals in listening tests provide inconclusive result; some studies suggest that visual plays facilitative role and it helps task takers to improve the scores (e.g. Ginther). Where as some studies reveal contradictory result that visuals play no facilitative role on the task takers performance (e.g. Coniam, 2001; Ockey, 2007). One of the research scholars Gruba (1993) conducted his study using the academic lectures on 91 a dvanced level ESL students and compared students’ responses on two modes of presentation, audio only and audio with visual format . The study did not reveal and statistically significant difference between two types of tasks audio only and audio with visuals. Another significant co mparative study on two modes of listening, audio only and audio with visual, covering open ended short questions by Coniam (2001), reveals that task takers with audio only format performed well. There were 104 Hong Kong English language teachers as subjects of the study however the difference was not statistically significant. On the basis of his comparative study Ockey (2007) identifies five visual clues: lip movement, gestures, hand movement, facial gestures and body gestures. He discovered that visual clues facilitate some task takers but distracting to others. Conclusion After having referred to the previous studies, no specific result was found on the role of v isuals in listening tests. There is a need for further research on the role of visuals on task takers performance. 32 Mevada & Shah (2015). Visuals and their Effect in Listening Comprehension. References [1] Anderson, A., & Lynch, T. (1988). Listening. Oxford University Press. [2] Barker, L., Gladney, K., Edwards, R., Holley, F., & Gaines, C. (1980). An investigation of proportional time spent in various communication activities by college students. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 8(2), 101-109. 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