Optimizing visually-assisted listening comprehension

The fact that visual aids such as pictures or graphs can lead to greater comprehension by language learners has been well established. Nonetheless, the order of presenting visuals to listeners is left unattended. This study examined listening comprehension from a strategy of introducing visual information, either prior to or during an audio activity, and also looked at listening comprehension without visuals present. The aim was to find out under what presentation conditions visual annotations would optimize listening comprehension of language learners. A linguistically homogeneous group of EFL learners took a number of listening comprehension tests under three different conditions. In the first condition, the test takers first looked at a number of pictures related to the listening materials and then, putting the pictures aside, listened to the relevant audiocassettes. In the second condition, the test takers looked at the pictures and listened to the audiocassettes simultaneously. In the pictures-free condition, the test takers merely listened to the audiocassettes in their conventional form. The listening texts were counterbalanced in presentation. According to the results, test takers' performance varied significantly across the three conditions, with the pictures-before-listening condition manifesting the best scores while taking the least time, the pictures-during-listening condition the second best scores and the pictures-free-listening condition the lowest scores but taking the longest time. The inclusion of visuals prior to audio materials was the sole condition that significantly optimized comprehension.