A Study on Students’ Attitudes Towards Text Crowding on Multilingual Educational Slides

Created on 21st September 2022

Conference: The Southeast Asian Conference on Education (SEACE2023)
Title: A Study on Students’ Attitudes Towards Text Crowding on Multilingual Educational Slides
Stream: International Education
Presentation Type: Virtual Poster Presentation
Authors:
Laksmira Kusumo Adhani, Kyushu University, Japan
Gerard B. Remijn, Kyushu University, Japan

Abstract:

The need for multilingual educational materials in higher education is growing rapidly. It is still largely unclear, however, whether students consider extra textual information, i.e., the same information in two or more languages, as an increase in cognitive load or not. Recent research on multilingual subtitles in videos has shown that viewers tend to allocate their visual attention towards subtitles in their native (L1) language, while L2 subtitles did not add any cognitive load. Interestingly, compared with having no subtitles, multilingual subtitles were even considered beneficial for content comprehension. So far, however, it is still unknown whether these findings also relate to multilingual educational slides. In the present research, we therefore used rating scales to investigate students’ attitudes towards this issue, particularly focusing on text crowding. We asked 25 Japanese and 25 Indonesian students to provide their opinions about unilingual, bilingual, and trilingual educational slides, with the same content provided in Japanese, Bahasa Indonesia, and English, in which the amount of content and the lay-out was systematically varied. The main findings showed that students were significantly more distracted by the information on multilingual slides as compared to that on unilingual slides. However, when the lay-out of the slides was such that the languages were visually grouped in separate sections, no such trend occurred. The same results were obtained for both student groups, clearly implying that educators can use multilingual slides provided they visually group information separately for each language.