Improving Foreign Language proficiency in the UK

Transforming Classroom Language Teaching through Multimedia

In the UK, the numbers of 16-year-olds studying a modern foreign language (French, German, and Spanish) are low, as is foreign language proficiency when compared with the rest of Europe. We also know that UK learners make less use of foreign language multimedia such as video clips and computer games outside of school than is the case in Europe. There, multimedia seems to have a beneficial impact on foreign language development. There may be a vicious circle at work, however – UK learners’ lower foreign language proficiency perhaps makes it harder for them to understand multimedia independently. Furthermore, we have limited understanding, of what kinds of multimedia are most beneficial for what kind of learner, how they should be used, and what additional scaffolds might be needed for lower proficiency learners to benefit from them. These are all issues which the current study seeks to explore, to enhance understanding, for researchers and practitioners, of how multimedia use can improve foreign language comprehension and vocabulary growth.

The study involves a collaboration with both teachers and learners, to develop nine sets of foreign language multimedia learning materials (French, German, Spanish). These will then be tried out and evaluated with 90 Year 7 learners in three schools. As learners view the materials individually on a laptop or tablet, their eye movements will be tracked by the built-in webcam through an online eye-tracking platform. This will show, for example, how much time they spend looking at visual or written elements of the materials. They will also complete a working memory test, a creativity task, listening comprehension and vocabulary tests. These data will provide evidence to answer important questions: how the presence or absence of visual elements in multimedia materials affects listening comprehension, vocabulary learning, and attention allocation; and whether that differs for different kinds of learners.

We will organise a Creative Multimedia Materials “Mining” Competition for schools. Learners from schools across England will be invited and asked to find online the most interesting, linguistically accessible multimedia materials and identify what they learnt from them. A selection of materials will be made available through the project website. Learners submitting the five most highly-rated materials will receive a gift token as a prize.

The study is on-going and currently at the stage of finalising the multimedia language learning materials. The next step will be piloting these materials to see how suitable they are for learners. We hope that findings of the study will provide guidelines to help school modern foreign language teachers in English speaking countries who use multimedia for instruction to design their teaching content more effectively, with a particular focus on how to balance the use of different types of verbal and visual input to aid comprehension and learning.

Example multimedia language learning materials with heatmap showing learner’s eye movement patterns

This project, led by Anthony Zhang (University of Reading) is funded in part by Creative Multilingualism small grants.

Find out more about the Creative Multilingualism project here.