Proficiency and Comprehension of Television News in a Foreign Language

The influence of proficiency & the roles of pictures, visual redundancy, & accessibility of oral input are investigated in a study of the comprehension of English-language videos by students of English as a foreign language at a Brazilian university. Subjects (Ss) were divided into less & more proficient groups (N = 37 each) based on a cloze test of oral comprehension & wrote 10-line Portuguese summaries after two viewings of each of two videos containing CNN news features. Propositions in the videos are classified as redundant if semantic content resembled accompanying images & judged subjectively to be either more or less accessible. Ss' mentions of visual propositions, redundant & nonredundant propositions, & more & less accessible propositions are tabulated by S group. Results show that redundancy, accessibility of oral input, & the presence of images appear to facilitate comprehension in both more & less proficient groups; it is concluded that videos may be appropriate at lower levels of student English proficiency than is commonly believed. 4 Tables, 25 References. Adapted from the source document