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Digital media has a huge impact on today‟s society. Technologies give opportunities for teachers to access different tasks, exercises, games and videos for teaching students a new language. This also means that teachers have opportunity to conduct more varied lessons to motivate students‟ learning. However, digital media comes with advantages as well as disadvantages. This project will therefore discuss the use of digital media for learning English as a foreign language and discover what teachers thinks about using digital media for teaching. To examine the use of digital media in today‟s school and teachers‟ views of using digital media for learning. This project will carry out interviews and observations on teachers from a selected school. Participants from the selected school are teachers who use digital media regularly to teach Swedish students the English language. Moreover, the participants also discussed the advantages and disadvantages with using of digital media in teaching.

Have you ever tried to remember a word in a foreign language? What strategy did you use? In several studies, we examined the beneficial effects of viewing pictures and performing gestures while learning foreign language words. Both pictures and gestures helped primary school kids and adults to better remember the meanings of foreign language words compared to learning by just listening. For kids, pictures and gestures were equally helpful. For adults, gestures were more helpful than pictures. Both visual and motor brain areas helped with learning the foreign language words. Our studies suggest that learning foreign language words with pictures and gestures is helpful for learners, because pictures and gestures allow both kids and adults to experience the meanings of words through multiple senses.

Despite a rise in the use of “learning by doing” pedagogical methods in praxis, little is known as to how the brain benefits from these methods. Learning by doing strategies that utilize complementary information (“enrichment”) such as gestures have been shown to optimize learning outcomes in several domains including foreign language (L2) training. Here we tested the hypothesis that behavioral benefits of gesture-based enrichment are critically supported by integrity of the biological motion visual cortices (bmSTS). Prior functional neuroimaging work has implicated the visual motion cortices in L2 translation following sensorimotor-enriched training; the current study is the first to investigate the causal relevance of these structures in learning by doing contexts. Using neuronavigated transcranial magnetic stimulation and a gesture-enriched L2 vocabulary learning paradigm, we found that the bmSTS causally contributed to behavioral benefits of gesture-enriched learning. Visual motion cortex integrity benefitted both short- and long-term learning outcomes, as well as the learning of concrete and abstract words. These results adjudicate between opposing predictions of two neuroscientific learning theories: While reactivation-based theories predict no functional role of specialized sensory cortices in vocabulary learning outcomes, the current study supports the predictive coding theory view that these cortices precipitate sensorimotor-based learning benefits.:I. Abkürzungsverzeichnis II. Abbildungsverzeichnis III. Einleitung 1. Fremdsprachenlernen 1.1 Sensorische Modalitätsvergleiche 1.2 Sensomotorisches Lernen 2. Lerntheorien 2.1 Theorie des prädiktiven Kodierens 2.2 Theorie des prädiktiven Kodierens für multisensorisches Lernen 3. Sulcus temporalis superior für biologische Bewegung 4. Transkranielle Magnetstimulation 4.1 Passagere Funktionsinhibition mittels transkranieller Magnetstimulation IV. Ableitung der Rationale V. Publikationsmanuskript VI. Zusammenfassung VII. Literaturverzeichnis VIII. Appendix A. Abbildungen B. Ergänzendes Material der Publikation C. Darstellung des eigenen Beitrags D. Erklärung über die eigenständige Abfassung der Arbeit E. Lebenslauf F. Publikationen G. Danksagung

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The primary purpose of the present study was to examine the effect of explicit instruction and feedback on the development of lexis and cohesion in second language writing as well as the extent to which these two measures correlated with overall writing quality scores. The participants were two intact classes of first-year Japanese university students who attended class twice a week for 14 weeks. The classes were randomly assigned to an explicit instruction group (n = 34) and a comparison group (n = 31). The explicit group received instruction and feedback on the use of target vocabulary and cohesion, while the comparison group only submitted drafts. Both groups produced three drafts of a comparison-contrast essay for Task 1 and a problem-solution essay for Task 2 during one academic semester. Based on their writing performance, six participants were selected for interviews about their learning experiences to complement the results of the quantitative analyses. Writing samples from each participant were analyzed with TALLES (Kyle & Crossley, 2015), TAALED 1.41 (Zenker & Kyle, 2021), and TAACO 2.0 (Crossley et al., 2016). Each draft was assessed for the number of target words, three lexical complexity metrics— MATTR 50 content words (MATTR), COCA academic frequency logarithm content words (COCAFrq), and COCA academic trigram MI2 (Trigrams) —two cohesion indices—All connectives and Adjacent overlap between paragraphs content words (AdjacentP)—and overall writing quality produced with a writing rubric. Six raters trained in applied linguistics assessed the participants’ essays, and FACETS 3.80.0 (Linacre, 2017) was used to produce interval measures of student ability and rater severity. Five hypotheses were assessed. Hypothesis 1 predicted that the explicit instruction group would score higher than the comparison group on target word and cohesion use, and overall writing quality. The results supported Hypothesis 1 for both tasks. The explicit instruction group increasingly used target words and cohesion based on descriptive statistics. Both groups significantly improved overall writing quality over time. The explicit instruction group significantly scored higher. The comparison group was slower in learning about writing essays during Task 1. Both groups scored higher in Task 2. Hypothesis 2, which predicted that both groups would improve on the lexical indices and that the explicit instruction group would exceed the comparison group, was partially supported. MATTR and COCAFrq significantly improved, but Trigram did not improve. There were significant group differences in COCAFrq and Trigrams, but not in MATTR. The comparison group scored higher on COCAFrq, and the explicit instruction group scored higher on Trigram. In Task 2, MATTR improved significantly, but COCAFrq and Trigrams did not. There were no group differences. More effects were found in Task 1 than in Task 2. Hypothesis 3, which predicted that cohesion would improve over time for both groups and that the explicit instruction group would exceed the comparison group, was mostly supported. The results of Task 1 showed that All connectives and AdjacentP significantly improved. Although there was no group significant difference in All connectives, there was a group difference in AdjacentP, as the explicit instruction group scored higher. The results of Task 2 showed that All connectives did not significantly improve over time, but AdjacentP did. Global cohesion was affected more than local cohesion. Hypothesis 4, which predicted that lexis would be positively correlated with overall writing quality for both groups, was supported for Task 1 and not supported for Task 2. In Task 1, MATTR was significantly positively correlated with overall writing quality. COCAFrq was significantly negatively correlated. Trigrams were not correlated. In Task 2, none of lexical indices were correlated. Hypothesis 5 predicted that cohesion would be positively correlated with overall writing quality. This hypothesis was partially supported in Task 1 and Task 2. All connectives were not correlated with overall writing quality, but AdjacentP was significantly and positively correlated with overall writing quality in Task 2. The study contributes to the understanding of the development and assessment of lexis and cohesion using computational automated tools. L2 development is a complex phenomenon, so a further examination of assessment indices offers a wealth of research in future studies. / Applied Linguistics

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