Bimodale Aanbieding en Consolidatie Bij Woord-Verwerving

In this article we address the question whether in word learning the effects of a bimodal (reading and pronouncing) condition are superior to the effects obtained in a monomodal (written only) condition. Research in the domains of psychology, psycholinguistics and foreign language learning lends support to the hypothesis that the effects of bimodal presentation and learning of words will be superior. In our experiment, pupils of intermediate classes from three different schools had to learn twelve French words in a bimodal condition: the words were presented in a text in a listening + reading condition; then the pupils learned the words by reading and pronouncing them. Pupils of three other (parallel) classes from the same three schools only read the same text and learned the words in a writing condition. The results of our investigation provide modest evidence for better retention in the bimodal condition: overall scores of the imodal' classes proved superior to scores of the monomodal classes. But this result is almost exclusively due to the results of only one school; in the two other schools test results did not differ significantly. This may be due to the small number of words. In subsequent research, the number of words to be learned will have to be larger than the modest number of twelve, in order to provide more convincing results.