Eighteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

This study investigated the effects of multimodality and language background on L2 Italian learners’ listening comprehension. An experiment was conducted to compare the comprehension of an audiovisual tape in different modalities such as video with subtitles, video without subtitles and audio-alone. Twenty-one undergraduate students (ten males and eleven females), studying first-semester Italian course in a U.S. university, participated in this study. Ten participants were English monolinguals while the other ten participants were Spanish-English bilinguals. Group 1 was exposed to the video with subtitles, group 2 to video without subtitles, and group 3 to audio. Participants’ comprehension was evaluated by the closed-ended questions (true and false) and open-ended questions (wh-questions) with multiple-choice or short answers. A language background questionnaire was designed to compare participants’ background and listening comprehension. The results showed that comprehension enhances when learners are exposed to a text presented through multimodalities. Moreover, L1 experience in Spanish leads to positive transfer from Spanish to Italian in listening comprehension. However, there is no significant difference between participants who speak a second language and participants who don’t have any second language. Similarly, there is no significant difference in gender.