The impact of input format on written performance in a listening-into-writing assessment

Abstract

Over the last five decades, research in teaching and testing (academic) listening has investigated different foci. Initially, teaching listening involved bottom-up approaches (Dirven and Oakeshott-Taylor, 1984) then both higher- and lower-level processes were integrated (Voss, 1984). In the early 2000s, different input formats (Read, 2002) and discourse features of lectures (Thompson, 2003) were the subjects of academic listening research. More recently, EAP tests have increasingly taken an integrated approach to reflect real-world tasks, yet few studies have looked at integrated listening-into-writing tasks (Cubilo and Winke, 2013). This counter-balanced measures design study investigates how test taker performance differs on an integrated EAP listening-into-writing task when lecture input is presented as audio only in one half and video in the other half of the input. Two groups of test takers took part in the current study. A Hotelling's T2 test revealed a statistically significant effect on scores when test takers were presented with the audio only input first but there was no significant effect on scores when the video input was presented first. Data on test taker preferences revealed that more people preferred the video input to audio only.