Effects of Progressive Visuospatial Cues on EFL Learners' Processing of Animated Visualizations Through Mobile Device

摘要

ABSTRACT The present empirical study was to examine whether progressive snowball-like cues can benefit learners in learning the operation of a mechanical system. In particular, this study investigated the effects of the experimental condition on the retention and transfer test results and cognitive load by considering the prior knowledge as a covariate. The instructional material used in conducting the study was a self-regulatory, mobile phone-based animation depicting the kinematics of a musical instrument. A total of 131 English as a foreign language (EFL) learners recruited from three sections of a reading course participated in the experiment. First, their prior knowledge was assessed. Next, they were randomly assigned to one of three groups involving three different conditions – animation-only, entity-cued animation, and arrow-entity-cued animation. Immediately after the experimental treatment by manipulating the instructional visualizations, the participants were administered retention and transfer tests concerning the operation of the mechanical system and a cognitive load questionnaire. The experimental results indicated that progressive snowball-like cues were beneficial in identifying the causal relation between different components during the operation of a mechanical system as indicated by the learners’ retention and transfer test results. Significantly, the experimental results demonstrated that the progressive snowball-like cues helped the learners’ attention to be equally distributed to each component by reducing the dynamic components to outcompete the cues for learners’ attention.