The Effect of Keyboarding and Presentation Format on the Recall of Accent Marks in L2 Learners of French

Abstract

Are there some implementations of technology in the language classroom which lead to measurable advantages over others? Sturm and Golato (in press) found considerable variance on dictée tests within groups of students who practiced a list of accent-bearing target words by handwriting, typing using preprogrammed function keys, or typing using ALT+ numeric codes. These results contradict the results of Gascogine-Lally (2000), who found that students who typed a paragraph recalled accents better than those who wrote the paragraph by hand. The present study seeks to explore the difference between the two studies. Participants were exposed to Gascoigne-Lally's paragraph, as well as a set of words in both list and paragraph form. One-way ANOVAs revealed no significant differences between groups, although repeated-measures ANOVAs revealed differences within participants on different sets of target words on immediate posttests. The results of this study encourage future research to investigate the results obtained by Gascoigne-Lally as well as Sturm and Golato.