With the aim of improving the provision of online feedback on written and oral formative tasks within the field of Foreign Language French, the effectivity of screencasts to create audiovisual feedback is investigated throughout this study. Learning practitioners are looking to enhance ICT tools for the development of online learning programmes in response to changes in our learning environment caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Although much research has been focussed on remote teaching techniques, this study aims to focus on the provision of useful audio-visual feedback in the form of screencasts. The first-year students learning French at the University of Cape Town were selected as participants for this study. Two activities, one written and one oral activity, were created using the university's learning platform namely Vula. The students completed and submitted these tasks using the upload and recording tools available to them on Vula. Audio-visual feedback was then created and provided to each student for their tasks. The audio-visual feedback was sent in the form of screencasts which were created using Screencastify, available for free download as a Google Chrome extension. These screencasts were embedded in the assignments and digitally returned to the students via Vula. Students then completed a subsequent questionnaire, using Google Documents, encouraging them to share their perceptions of the audio-visual feedback in terms of its effectivity, ability to make them notice their mistakes and the pause and rewind functions. The aim was to draw a comparison between the written and oral feedback traditionally provided in the classroom and the audio-visual feedback in the form of screencasts, as well as to determine if audio-visual feedback is able to put learners at ease. The results of this research indicated that communicating and making mistakes caused students to experience anxiety. Secondly, traditional written feedback can be effective, but oral feedback in the classroom is often provided too quickly for many students to pay attention or to take notes. Furthermore, students showed a preference towards receiving correction from their teacher rather than from their peers. The audio-visual feedback in the form of screencasts proved to be useful to most of the students some of whom indicated that it was a more memorable and interactive. Some students felt more at ease when receiving the audio-visual feedback because it was sent to them on their personal devices and other students found the pause and rewind functions useful for practicing their pronunciation or for revision. Screencastify or similar tools can therefore be considered useful for the provision of audiovisual feedback as part of an online learning programme.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:uct/oai:localhost:11427/33873 |
| Date | 14 September 2021 |
| Creators | Nieuwoudt, Kerry Lee |
| Contributors | Schmid, Karin |
| Publisher | Faculty of Humanities, School of Languages and Literatures |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Master Thesis, Masters, MA |
| Format | application/pdf |
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