Hello and welcome to the
Next Parallel session at 4:00.
And we are going to start with Nomi Bharara, who's
going to talk about passive aid as a language learning tool.
And I'm going to talk a little bit about about, you know, anybody
who's a B.A.
in translation and into linguistic mediation
from the University of Valencia and from 2019
and an MBA in translating for business and international institutions
from us to university in Birmingham for from 2020
during under graduate work placement and while studying
postgraduate degree, she worked as a Spanish teacher
at Aston University from 2019 to 2020,
and she was awarded prizes for academic excellence
from both universities, as well as a prize for the best dissertation
written in the fields of translation at Aston
University in 2021.
So she's quite a knowledgeable person.
We are delighted to have him with us.
She also gained and at the Aston University Global
Excellence Scholarship in 2019, funded by
and funded by the university, the Spanish Ministry of Education.
She's currently writing her doctoral thesis while working
as a teaching fellow at the University of Valencia.
Her research revolves mainly around audio visual translation,
the translation of humor
and media accessibility to different youth and is a pleasure to have you.
Thank you very much for the introduction.
Hello, everyone.
Well, first of all,
I should probably let you know that I've got a pretty bad cold.
So if I sneeze or cough, I'm
sorry it may happen, so I should probably let you know.
Yeah.
So thank you for the introduction
and thanks to the organizers of this fascinating conference.
Well, as you can see, the focus of my contribution today is firstly,
value description as a language self learning tool.
So as a resource for students to use outside the classroom
to improve their foreign language skills.
And in this case, I focused on vocabulary and pronunciation
in particular.
Well, so in the past few years
there seems to have been growing interest in the applications
and potential of I'll give description as a foreign language learning tool.
But I have noticed that this interest seems largely
focused on active approaches rather than passive.
So for this reason, the aim of this study is to obtain
some more data about this approach, about a passive approach.
Most specifically,
the aim is to shed some more light not only on the effectiveness
of passive audio description, to acquire new vocabulary and improve
pronunciation, but also to learn about students opinions about it.
So do they find it useful?
Do they find it enjoyable?
Would they be willing to use it outside the classroom?
We we'll see in a few minutes.
Okay, so I guess we're all familiar with idea description here,
but it should be noted that
in the context of second Language acquisition in particular,
all the description can be understood as active and passive
and active approach to It implies that students
improve their language skills by creating an idea description
script, whereas a passive approach implies
that students are exposed to an idea description that already exists,
so they improve their language skills by listening to it.
So why am I interested in researching passive audio description
in particular?
Well, there are mainly three reasons.
Firstly, as I mentioned earlier, there seem to be fewer studies
dedicated to passive idea description as compared
to active.
In addition to that, autonomous work outside the classroom
is pivotal to really making progress when learning a language.
But despite this, in the context of all the description, at least
it seems that the research available is focused primarily on this modality
as a resource for teachers to use in the classroom
rather than for learners to use outside the classroom.
So although audio description has been reported to be effective,
enjoyable and useful in the context of a classroom,
it is unclear whether it would also be so if use as a self-learning
tool.
Moreover, according to several studies, second language
learners appear to experience
difficulty acquiring new vocabulary and working on their pronunciation.
Therefore, they could perhaps be interested in learning about
effective ways to work autonomously on improving these areas.
In this respect, passive idea description might be a possibility.
Firstly, because all the descriptions are received orally
so students could obtain valuable input on how to pronounce words.
And secondly, because all the other descriptions
are generally rich in terms of lexis and syntax,
because they must verbalize many visual details,
but they must also do it effectively and concisely due to the time
limitations of audio description.
For example, a study by Solway
showed that English audio descriptions use the higher rates
of non grammatical and concise words than general language.
And apart from that, all the descriptions match the style
and tone of the program that is being described.
So exposure to all the described films from different genres
could perhaps result in exposure to a variety of lexical choices.
So in light of all these considerations, the aim of this study
was to explore the possibility of using passive audio description
as a second language self-learning tool to see if it can be offered
as a potential response to this need that students may have
for this purpose.
I aim to give an answer to two research questions.
The first is whether passive audio description is an effective resource
for learners to work on their vocabulary and invention,
and the second has to do
with learners opinion on this tool, whether they find
it useful and enjoyable,
and whether they would be willing to use it as a self-learning resource.
I just need a minute.
Okay.
So given the nature of these questions, the materials
like I used to wear all year describe the videos, tests and questionnaires
regarding the LDA descriptions to show short videos were chosen
from YouTube and learners were asked to watch them at home.
The first video was an extract from the film The Lion King,
while the second is from the film Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
And in connection with the tests and questionnaires,
firstly, students were asked to take the same vocabulary and pronunciation
tests before and after being exposed to the audio descriptions,
because by doing so,
their knowledge of performance in both stages could be compared,
which allowed me to assess the effectiveness of passive audio
description to acquire new vocabulary in the preferred translation.
And secondly,
students were asked to fill out two questionnaires
in which they expressed their views on the description and on
the usefulness and enjoy ability of passive for the description.
These tests and questionnaires were filled in by 17 of
my students who are enrolled in the module English language.
Two of the degree in English Studies at the University of Valencia.
And the aim of this module is to consolidate a B2 level of English,
and the focus is particularly on listening and moral skills.
In this case.
So this is a sample of the types of questions that I use.
Well, like I asked in the first questionnaire,
which was about their knowledge
and opinion about IQ description in general,
and this is a sample of the kinds of questions
asked in the pretest which they took before watching
the videos on the left, you can see some examples of vocabulary questions,
whereas the questions on the right are pronunciation
questions.
These were the videos that I chose for the test, and they did not exceed
5 minutes in total.
This is a sample of the questions asked in the post-test,
which were exactly the same as in the pre test.
Even if the ones that I show here are different
and this was completed after watching the videos.
And finally this is a sample of the questionnaire
where participants expressed their views on passive of the description.
Once they had already watched the videos,
it was divided into four sections in this case, one with questions
about the usefulness of passive of the description, another about how
all the description helped them
to figure out the words that they did not know.
And another about the enjoy ability of passive ugly description
and one less section where they gave their overall opinion
about this resource.
So to respond to my first research question, I used the results
from the tests
based on them.
The results were quite positive.
Firstly, the total average mark improved by one point out of ten,
thus it went from 6.9 in the pretest to 7.9 in the post-test,
which seems like quite a significant improvement.
Additionally, the number of participants
who obtained excellent marks grew from only 6% in the pretest
to 18% in the post-test and the number of participants
who obtained low marks that is below six
decreased from 12% to 0%.
So a general improvements of marks is observed,
which points to improved the knowledge of vocabulary and pronunciation.
Overall
regarding vocabulary questions.
In particular,
none of the participants obtained marks above nine in the pretest,
whereas this number increased to 23% in the post-test
After watching the videos, and a similar pattern of improvement
can be observed in the participants who failed this part of the test.
As the number decreased from 23% to 9%
and less concerning pronunciation questions.
Improvements were also detected since the number of participants
who obtained marks above nine increased from 40% to 60%,
and in the pretest, 10% of the students got marks
the low six while in the post-test everyone obtained
marks above six
so that to respond to my second research question,
I used the results from the questionnaires
firstly in connection with participants
views on the usefulness of passive audio description.
As can be seen,
they found it particularly useful for acquiring new vocabulary
since 82% of their students responded positively.
Although to a lesser extent, they also found
it useful to improve their pronunciation.
And even though these skills were not assessed in the tests,
82% of the participants also thought that
passive of the description could help to improve their listening skills,
although they did not seem to find it equally useful for intonation
or grammar.
So given these results, it is perhaps not surprising
that 71% of the respondents thought that if they consumed
all their descriptions regularly, their language skills would improve
in this respect, although to a lesser extent,
64% of the participants said that they would consider a consuming
of a description with the aim of improving their vocabulary.
In particular,
half of them also showed interest in potentially using it
to work on their pronunciation intonation and grammar.
But oddly enough, they did not show as much interest
in using it to improve their listening skills
because only 41% responded positively to this question,
in contrast with the 82% who thought the passive idea
of description could be useful in this respect.
So it appears that
overall participants find passive audio description useful.
However, when asked whether they would voluntarily watch, Alvear
described products in their free time to learn or improve a language,
only 52% of the participants
responded positively.
So it seems interesting to wonder why 19% of the respondents
believe that passive audio description would help them with their language
skills, but did not seem open to using it at home.
So when asked about the enjoy ability of passive audio description to learn
or improve a language, 70% responded that they found it
entertaining, 53% deemed it convenient.
70% thought it was an easy way to improve pronunciation
and 82% thought it was an easy way to learn new vocabulary.
So as we can see in general, it would seem that participants
find passive value description a little more useful than enjoyable.
This could perhaps explain why, despite finding passive audio
description useful, participants did not seem equally eager
to use it at home or even to recommend it
to other language students.
As we can see here, It should be noted, though, that
nobody showed a strong disagreement with this or the previous question,
so that's good news.
It also seems interesting
to look at the potential reasons why learners might regard passive
IQ description as easy to learn with, but not particularly convenient.
So firstly, half of the participants expressed that they never or rarely
had to look unknown words up when watching other described videos.
So what may have contributed to their view of passive
IQ description as easy to use is the fact that in many cases
checking a dictionary to understand the meaning of a word
that they never heard before was a necessary.
In fact, respondents
found that in general they could often or always obtain this information
from the context of the sentence into which the word was inserted
and to a lesser extent also from the image.
Despite this,
as I mentioned earlier,
they did not seem to find this resource particularly convenient.
And perhaps the reason is that although
the vast majority of the participants can access plenty
of audio descriptions from the comfort of their own home and at any time
based on their responses, it seems that many perhaps do not know
how to access these resources, since nearly half marked neutral.
When asked about this, this could perhaps be another reason
why, despite finding passive,
the description useful and entertaining,
they do not seem as eager to use it at home or to recommend it
even as can be seen here.
In both cases, a little over half of the participants
showed a positive response towards these questions.
The ones on on the right, whereas around 70% of them
showed a positive response towards the usefulness and the enjoy
ability of passive description.
So the aim of this study was to shed some more light
on the effectiveness of passive idea description to acquire
new vocabulary in professionalization,
but mainly to learn about students opinions about it.
But let us
begin by looking at the effectiveness of passive audio description.
So regarding my first research question,
based on the results of the tests,
the answer seems positive, particularly for Lexis.
In fact, this seems to contribute to confirming the results
of previous studies, where passive audio description also proved
to be an effective resource to learn vocabulary and improve pronunciation
by way of example, even if modern non for the moment study found that
using all the description in foreign in foreign language teaching
proved to be effective for fostering lexical and physiological competence
and carried out a study that concluded that visually impaired children
can develop their language skills by consuming all the description
because it enriches their vocabulary pool
and it teaches pronunciation.
So of course, when I designed this study, I was interested
in interested in helping to corroborate those findings.
But my main objective was actually to find out
what students think about passive audio description
and more specifically, whether they find it useful
and enjoyable to learn vocabulary and conversation session.
The reason is that I thought that if they responded positively,
they would probably be more likely to use it at home
than if they found it boring or ineffective.
And also that, as I mentioned earlier, I had not found any studies
that tackled this particular question.
So therefore, my second research question aimed at finding out
what students think of passive audio description
and whether they would be willing to use it autonomously.
Regarding their opinions on passive idea description,
they seemed to find it a little more useful than enjoyable,
and what they like best about
it is the ease with which vocabulary in front of a station can be learned
concerning their
willingness to use passive audio description in their free time.
Over half of the participants responded positively,
which represents a rather significant number of participants.
However, this figure appears, let's say, relatively low
if we consider the
number of respondents for the passive ugly description useful, enjoyable
and easy to use.
Which makes me wonder what the reason for this might be, I'm
thinking maybe personal motivation.
So all in all, passive audio description could be offered as
as a self-learning tool that would suit most learners needs.
But based on my results,
it should be considered that it might not work for everybody.
It has been observed that passive audio description
is not only effective for me is also deemed effective
by learners, as well as enjoyable and comfortable.
And even in spite of that, some participants
reported that they would not use it at home.
Again, maybe personal motivation is a factor here,
and if so, perhaps a potential solution
could be introducing it in the classroom to create a habit.
Aside from these main
results, other observations have been derived from this study.
First, as I explained earlier, the context and the image help
participants to figure out the meaning of unknown words
without the need to check a dictionary.
So therefore it could be argued that passive
idea of description is useful not only to learn vocabulary,
but also to learn that it is possible to figure it out in context
without the help of a dictionary.
And I think that this is particularly beneficial for real life situations
such as conversations with native speakers or official exams,
because these are situations in which
learners normally do not have the time or the possibility
to to look anything up.
So it seems desirable to expose them to experiences
in which they become comfortable with not depending on dictionaries.
And secondly, participants experience with all.
The description was also assessed from a non didactic viewpoint,
in particular before and after watching the videos, respondents
were asked whether they were familiar with audio description
and about their habits
or willingness to consume it just for the sake of it.
Regarding their familiarity with the description.
Before this experiment, only 47% of the respondents knew what it is,
whereas this number dramatically increased to 94% afterwards
and in connection with their audio description viewing
before watching the videos, they were asked
whether they had watched or usually watched all the of these products,
to which only 24% responded. Yes.
But after watching the videos, 47% said
that they would be willing to consume all of these products in the future.
So in other words, before this exercise, most
participants were not even familiar with the description.
But after it, nearly half of them would be willing to consume
all the discussed products just for the sake of it.
And I think this data is noteworthy because it seems to indicate
that offering passive audio inscription as a self-learning tool
can help to raise awareness
of the existence of media accessibility modalities
and to make people acquainted with them, which in turn
might increase public awareness of sensory impairments. So
this is my last slide
I would like to finish by suggesting some ideas
for further research in in this in this field.
Based on the limitations of my own study,
for instance, I could only assess the effectiveness of passive
other description to improve vocabulary and pronunciation.
But there are other skills that could also be assessed from this viewpoint.
I asked my students about this, and most of them thought that passive
idea description could also be useful to improve their listening skills.
So it could perhaps be interesting to look into this and establish
whether it could indeed be an effective tool for that.
Apart from this, due to limitations of time and resources,
the study could not be conducted under different parameters,
so it may also be desirable to replicate it
with other participants when learning a different language,
or whose second language level is different, for example,
or even if the sample in my case was not too small.
It was small, but not too small.
Perhaps the same study could be conducted
with a larger group of participants because that could yield more
generalizable results
and last, due to time limitations as well,
conducting follow up tests and questionnaires was not possible.
In my case, the post-test and the second questionnaire
were completed less than a week
after watching the video, see all the descriptions.
So the data that I have is pretty short term
and thus it could be interesting to know whether passive
of the description one works long term as well,
or whether participants, opinions or unwillingness
to use it as a self-learning tool may change with time.
Oops, sorry if I forgot about that.
So these are my references somewhere.
References.
And that is all from me. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Maybe
Thank you very much for keeping perfect timing
for making it through without coffee, which we're worried about.
And it's been really interesting.
I'm not sure. Do you have any questions for me?
Can people.
Yes, please.
Thank you very much.
It was very interesting.
And I like your passion very much.
So I'm sure everything is going I mean, the studies
that you follow up with that are going to be amazing.
So I have a question because you said that
probably the motivation of the students for not
stating that they were
willing to use audio description after that.
You think this has probably and this has to be with the idea
of not wanting anyone to tell them what they what they see.
Because I've had I've seen this problem with blind people
not used to to use audio description and sometimes they didn't want
to use this tool because they didn't want people to tell them
something that wasn't on the on the film.
So I don't know because you said personal motivations,
but maybe you talk to them.
And why do you think there's I mean,
some of some of them, they just say, no, we're not going to use this.
Like how how do you think this could interfere with their
hobbies or their free time?
I was I was actually pretty surprised when I when I saw
the results of the questionnaire, because that's exactly what I thought.
Like, if they find it useful and they find it entertaining,
why not use it to to improve their their language skills?
It didn't make much sense to me.
And I could only think about this lack of personal motivation.
Maybe, like maybe they are at home and the last thing that they're
thinking about is working on their own, their foreign language.
I suppose it's got to do with that.
If you've got any other ideas,
that's the only one thing I could come up with really.
I have a related question, but first of all, thank you so much for
this presentation was really well structured.
The study is very clear, very well-structured.
So congratulations.
So in
relation to this aspect, I was wondering,
have you thought about asking them
using open questions, perhaps
because that would help you, you know, uncover
their motivations
or explanations for this
answer that they they gave.
So this negative, let's say answer.
Did you think about that?
I actually thought about that was the question there was it?
It was I thought I should have let them
express themselves a little bit more rather than just agree, disagree.
I should have left.
I should have
put some open ended questions so that they could explain the reasons why.
But I thought about that exactly.
Next time, I will definitely do it because now I'm I'm left
with this out, obviously.
Yeah.
Now I'm asking because I had similar results to yours
and in the open questions
and, you know, they had the opportunity to to explain.
In my case, there were let's say
they didn't think that their level
was high enough in order to carry out the kind of activity,
although their level was actually very high.
So it was a lack of confidence, basically,
that was the main problem.
This is what came up in their explanation.
So I leave ask them if they if they had any problems,
understanding or following all the descriptions.
I did ask this question and I think only one person said
that they did have problems following them, but
the rest of the people seemed to seem to understand them.
So in my case, it was active.
And though so, you know, it's a different case.
But it's interesting because my students instead,
they all agreed that they wanted to use passive or your description at home
while they were more, you know, dubious
about active aid because they thought it was too difficult.
So, yeah, our results differ a little bit
and not in this respect, but it was really, really interesting.
So thank you very much. You two so much. Thanks.
Thank you.
You started a little bit late, so I just wanted to ask you one thing.
Okay? Is this part of your to a thesis?
No, it's not.
This is a study that I carried out independently.
Okay.
So later, I'd like to tell you a few things about that,
because we always have the same problem is
because you need so much involvement in any research like this
for the students point of view as well,
that sometimes if you don't have a control group,
it's quite difficult to know how much improvement you have.
Yes, by having the aid put into there, of course.
But it's really interesting what you've done. So yeah,
please carry on.
Thank you very. Much. And it's been a pleasure.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Nice session.
Okay, good.
So, yes.
So if that's okay. Any more questions?
Yeah.
I think not a question, but maybe
a recommendation.
In. Another conference.
They were talking about the motivational show and.
They were on. An important result.
Was that they were willing to do it at home.
The self autonomy, total self learning autonomously.
And I think maybe one of the differences were that.
They.
Got to choose. The people.
They wanted to.
That's a good point, actually.
Because they they just something maybe you can give them.
So they have everyone, every of them are different.
But most of them chose or something in this.
Case was a. Medical TV show.
So perhaps it would. Be.
For further research.
Yeah.
And I'm thinking now, now that you mention it, that
that could be a factor influencing their motivation.
Of course.
Yeah, that's.
That's useful. Thank you. But thank you so much.
It was.
Really good to.
Presentation. Thanks. Thank you.
Thanks everyone for taking part as well.
He's been really nice and motivating.
Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank.