Visual Aids to Learning in a Second Language: Adding Redundant Video to an Audio Lecture

Korean high school students (Experiment 1) and college students (Experiment 2a) received a 16-minute lesson on Antarctica that consisted of English audio only (audio group) or English audio with corresponding video depicting the scenes and objects described in the audio (audio+video group). The audio+video group scored significantly (d=0.33 in Experiment 1) or marginally higher (d=0.42 in Experiment 2a) than the audio group on a subsequent comprehension test. The mean difficulty rating of the audio+video group was significantly less than that of the audio group (d=0.62 in Experiment 1 and d=0.96 in Experiment 2a); the mean effort rating of the audio+video group was significantly greater than that of the audio group (d=0.60 in Experiment 1 and d=0.79 in Experiment 2a). When the audio was in Korean, comprehension scores of college students did not benefit from added video (d=-0.03 in Experiment 2b). Copyright (c) 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.