Maria Pannatier

Current Research

• Multilingual academic landscape of online education

Being a popular medium video lecture poses certain challenges for those who learn academic content in a non-native language. The students have to cope not only with difficulties in comprehension of a video that they typically encounter which are associated with the audio channel but also need to process, understand, and respond to the content presented in the accompanying visual channel. Besides, they need to be actively engaged with video and develop new knowledge. Moreover, as proved by recent French research, transmitting academic content in a foreign language should not be implemented without explicit foreign language instructional support (Roussel et al., 2017). So, how can learning design deal with these challenges?

• Instructional aid of captions/subtitles for video content learning in a foreign language

One of the instructional supports to aid students' comprehension is to provide the commentary of the video in the written mode. However, an important question is whether the commentary should be delivered in the language of the video (captions) or the language of the learners (subtitles). The literature review resulted in defining three sets of studies that explain the beneficial or detrimental effects of captions/subtitles on students’ learning outcomes:

1. learning a foreign language
2. learning academic content in a native language
3. learning academic content in a foreign language

• Multimedia learning from captioned video lectures

The effects of captioned/subtitled video on learners’ performance in learning a foreign language in most cases proved to be positive except for low proficiency learners (Vanderplank, 2016). However, the results of studies in other subject areas provide evidence that captions can also hamper learning because they cause a split attention effect that increases the extraneous cognitive load required to process the instruction (Lee & Mayer, 2015). Besides, little is known about the effect of subtitles for content learning (van der Zee et al., 2017). Finally, the effect of captions on learning outcomes may depend on students’ individual characteristics: learners’ language proficiency and aptitudes.

• Expected research results

Ultimately, I intend to provide the educators with a set of guidelines when and for which level of language proficiency certain types of captions should be developed and enabled as merely providing English captions is not enough to guarantee accessibility and understanding. (Kent, Ellis, Latter, & Peaty, 2018).