Speakers
Description
Vietnamese upper-secondary students continue to struggle with listening skills due to grammar-focused instruction, poor phonological awareness, short attention spans, and limited short-term memory. Interactive videos, as multimodal learning tools, have shown promise in supporting L2 listening development by integrating both bottom-up and top-down processing. Grounded in Cognitive Load Theory and the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning, this study employed interactive videos with embedded questions and pre-/post-listening tasks via Nearpod to optimize cognitive load and foster learner engagement. While research has primarily explored interactive videos’ impact on listening performance, few studies have addressed how text difficulty influences both performance and participation. This study adopted a pre-experimental within-subjects longitudinal design conducted over three weeks, with six guided sessions involving 35 Grade 11 non-English majors in Vietnam, all at CEFR B1 level. Listening materials (CEFR B1–B2) were selected from reputable ELT textbooks. Text difficulty was assessed using Coh-Metrix indices (narrativity, syntactic simplicity, word concreteness, cohesion, Flesch Reading Ease, type-token ratio, speech rate), and task item readability was standardized using Cathoven. Materials were sequenced to gradually increase in difficulty from Week 1 to Week 3. Repeated-measures ANOVA revealed similar patterns for both performance scores and participation rates: significant increases from Week 1 to Week 2, followed by significant decreases from Week 2 to Week 3. However, no significant differences were found between Week 1 and Week 3. Analysis confirmed that Week 3 materials were significantly more complex. Findings highlight the importance of aligning text difficulty with learner proficiency in interactive video-based listening instruction.
Biography
Bui Tri Vu Nam (MA) is currently a primary lecturer at the English Department, Ho Chi Minh City University of Education. He holds a master's degree in Applied Linguistics & English Teaching Methodology at Curtin University, and is in charge of teaching ELT Methodology Modules, Learner Autonomy, Continuous Professional Development,... His PhD research proposal at ULIS revolves around reflective practice in pre-service teacher training. During his career, he has published a number of publications, including reference books for test-preparation, research articles, etc. His research interests are communicative language teaching, language testing and assessment, curriculum and materials development, etc.
Nguyen Ngo Tan Dat (BA) graduated with an excellent degree in TEFL at the English Department, Ho Chi Minh City University of Education. Having particular interests in multimodality in ELT, SLA, Artificial Intelligence in language teaching and learning, he aims to develop his research pathway with future studies into these fields.
