Paivio's "Dual Coding Theory" en Effect van Visuele Stimuli op het Verwerken en Onthouden van Informatie

The use of video in foreign language teaching is considered to be a powerful tool by many teachers and researchers. It seems, however, that a sound 'video teaching methodology' has not yet been fully developed. This article sets out to present some reflections on the advantages of the use of video. We will then briefly describe some elements from two more or less theoretical studies, Lang (1995) and particularly Paivio (1986), and discuss the results of other experiments that we found in the literature. Finally, we will put forward some tentative ideas about experiments that we will prepare on the basis of the most important findings of other experiments. The main idea is that information is best processed if it is presented in a redundant way, e.g., both by an audio and a video channel. Many experiments claim that reversed subtitling (subtitles not in L1, but in L2 or FL) is the most successful visual support for foreign language learners. Our experimental design will be organized as follows. Subjects (pre-university students and first-year university students of French) will be divided into four experimental groups to be tested under four different conditions: 1) Image, sound (French spoken text), no subtitles; 2) Image, no sound, French subtitles; 3) No image, sound, subtitles; 4) Image, sound, subtitles. We hypothesize that condition 4 will yield the best result, but before conducting the experiment, we will have to examine three aspects: 1) The assessment format: subjects might consider open questions unclear, whereas, in closed questioning (true-false, multiple choice, cloze), items might be biased by the test constructor. 2) Clarifying the distinction between high, medium, and low redundancy. 3) Bi- or multimodal information input may lead to cognitive overload.