Can colors, voices, and images help learners acquire the grammatical gender of German nouns?

Abstract

Knowledge of lexical items is arguably the most essential aspect of being able to communicate in a foreign language (Richards, 2000). Many studies have examined effective strategies for retaining the meaning of foreign words, but studies investigating the effectiveness of different methods for the retention of essential grammatical features of those words are unfortunately fewer. This study investigates whether memorizing the gender of German nouns concomitantly to their meaning results in a decreased ability by undergraduate native speakers of English to remember noun meaning, and whether a mnemonic approach to retaining the grammatical gender of German nouns may prove effective. In possibly the largest study of its kind (n = 283), the effectiveness of several mnemonic devices (colors, voices, images, and a combination of these) is also investigated for the retention of noun gender in German. The sole use of images simultaneously coding for noun meaning and gender led to the best observed results, as indicated by scores on two post-tests. The use of images seems to be a promising mnemonic technique for helping learners remember the gender of German nouns, while at the same time not significantly compromising their ability to recall noun meaning. The results of the present study have possible implications for German materials development and teaching, and for computer assisted language learning (CALL) in general.

Hearing and Seeing Tone Through Color: An Efficacy Study of Web‐Based, Multimodal Chinese Tone Perception Training

“…Therefore, rather than to (re)confirm the benefits of audiovisual over auditory training, which would have required data from an auditory-only comparison group, we focused our efforts on determining the relative effectiveness of different visualization techniques. Specifically, our results suggest that color coding had short-term positive effects on item and system learning (Table 3), which is consistent with Kohler's (2009) findings, but not Santos's (2015) and Arzt and Kost's (2016) results for German grammatical gender. After accounting for the effects of repeated testing, color-based training resulted in an average of 11% (SD = 21.82) gains for item learning in the immediate posttest and 12% (SD = 24.13) gains for system learning in the immediate posttest.…”

“…For instance, Kohler (2009) found that L2 learners benefited from color-coded articles when recalling case and grammatical gender in L2 German. However, Santos (2015), in a similar study, reported comparable performance levels between a color-coded group and a black-and-white comparison group. In Santos's study, an image mnemonic that relied on biological gender (e.g., an image of a woman to depict a feminine noun) yielded the best recall of grammatical gender.…”

Translanguaging Practices of Multilingual Learners of German

“…Current research on German learning in the United States focuses on monolingual students (Bartolotti & Marian, 2017;Belz & Reinhardt, 2004;Scheutz & Eberhard, 2004;Schmid, 2014;Abrams, 2016;de Oliveira Santos, 2015;Neville, Shelton, & McInnis, 2009;Dixon & Hondo, 2013). Bilingual identity is only explored in a few research studies that focus on German instructors-the biliteracy of students is not considered (Aslan, 2015;Ghanem, 2015;Weninger, 2007).…”

“…While it has been established that a second language influences the learning process of a third language as much as a first language, and that there is a growing number of bilingual students in the United States, German as a third language has not been studied widely (Falk & Bardel, 2010). Although research on third language learning is available in the United States it does not focus on German (Bono & Stratilaki, 2009;Cenoz & Gorter, 2011;De Angelis, 2007;De Angelis, 2011;Jaensch, 2011;Jessner, 2008;Rothman, Iverson, & Jurdy, 2010), but mostly on cognitive language learning (Bartolotti & Marian, 2017;Scheutz & Eberhard, 2004;Schmid, 2014), isolated language learning strategies (Abrams, 2016;de Oliveira Santos, 2015;Neville, Shelton, & McInnis, 2009;Dixon & Hondo, 2014) or German instructors (Aslan, 2015;Ghanem, 2015;Weninger, 2007). Cross-cultural differences have also been studied.…”