Developing Listening Comprehension in esl students at the Intermediate Level by Reading Transcripts While Listening: a cognitive Load Perspective

Reading-While-Listening(RWL)

Acommonstrategyusedforteachinglisteningskillsisreading-while-listening(RWL).
RWL has been shown to help students overcome some of the aforementioned challengespresented by listening. Chang (2011) noted in her study on RWL with audiobooks with high-school students in Taiwan that reading (while listening) helps language learners with wordboundaries and auditory discrimination, and to "get used to the spoken rate, rhythm, and thenaturalflowofthelanguage,andunderstandhowtochunktexts”(p.46).Therearedifferent ways toreadwhile listening,the two mostprominentbeingreadingcaptionsin the learners’ L1or L2 while watching and listening to a video or reading a transcript of a passage while listeningto it. "When using RWL, listening is the focus, so spoken texts, e.g., conversations, stories,lectures, and movies, are used to assist listening comprehension” (Chang, 2011, p. 46). Thestrategy of reading captions while listening is a commonly used and is generally an easy-to-access strategy used often in a classroom setting and also by students individually. Manylanguage learners have access to online videos that have captions available and they use thesecaptionstohelpaid intheircomprehensionofwhattheyhear.Becausecaptions areawidelyused strategy for scaffolding listening comprehension, the author chose to focus the present studyon reading a transcript while listening to a passage of the same text (RWL). From this point on inthis study, RWL will refer to reading-while-listening to a transcript. Using a transcript whenreading-while-listening is a technique sometimes used in classrooms as a teaching strategy, and itiseasierto controlin anexperimental setting.
As will be shown in the review of literature in this article, a common consideration in theresearch of RWL is cognitive load. Most of the studies found on RWL at least mention cognitiveload because RWL requires students to use two different skills, reading and listening together,which has the potential to increase students' cognitive load. Because of this, it seems appropriatetodiscuss the CognitiveLoad Theory anditsramifications for RWL.