Digital semiotics in ESP/EAP materials development: The study of the effects of DVD options for developing text-independent thinking and reading
Titel:
Digital semiotics in ESP/EAP materials development: The study of the effects of DVD options for developing text-independent thinking and reading
Auteur:
Razieh Rabbani Yekta
Verschenen in:
International journal of language studies
Paginering:
Jaargang 3 (2009) nr. 4 pagina's 453-472
Jaar:
2009
Inhoud:
This brief account is a report of three parts of a research project, on the effect of incorporating DVD options in EFL classroom. In the first part (Digital Semiotics For ESP/EAP Materials development: The Study of the Effects of Multi-Modal Input On the Development of Text-Independent Thinking/Reading), researcher approaches the problems of EAP/ESP materials and the gap that exists between their theoretical rational and what is actually materialized. Then with regard to the established goals of EAP courses, focused on developing critical thinking/reading ability, she proceeds further to investigate the effects of technologically enhanced reading materials, presented in intralingual subtitles of a videos, on developing text independent thinking ability of EAP students. To this end, researcher, adopting the Peirce's (1989) Psycho-Semiotic View of Thought, Halliday's (1998) Social-Semiotic View of language and Gottlibe's (2004) poly-Semiotic View of Subtitles, tries to see the potential connections between indexical efficiency of subtitled videos on one hand, and indexicality requirement of EAP courses on the other hand. With these, she found that: 1) the students who are exposed to the subtitled movies act better in normal cloze test of modified versions of the transcript of the dialogues (in which all of the hedges are removed). 2) There is no significant difference between reading competency of the students who are exposed to the subtitled movies without any advance organizer and those who read the transcript of the same movie with pre-reading activity on of meta-discourse elements (as measured through their performance in scrambled cloze test) and, 3) the subjects who are exposed to the subtitled video act better in unscrambling the scrambled version of the text. In conclusion, she says: Making perfect sense of a scrambled text (either clozed or an ordinary text) shows that subjects have formed a concept of the written text that is quite abstract. They must have a concept of schema in that is not dependent on any particular syntactic arrangement of the surface sentences. So, it seems that it is possible to use indexicality of the subtitled movies instead of teaching the formal aspects for EAP/ESP students to help them read their text rapidly with more concentration on the realities of the text, without the need for mere repetition of the lines on the pages.
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