A Mixed-Method Case Study: Is there Only the Pictorial Input that Affects Word Retention?

This mixed-method case study was conducted to probe how a set of pictures had an influence on a group of EFL university students’ retention of English words. Seven Thai university participants, enrolling in the course of English for Service Industry, were voluntarily engaged in the study. They took a pretest of 45 words they learned in class through the use of pictorial input for one semester, and right after the posttest, they recalled how they could remember the words in an individually stimulated recall protocol session. The result of T-test from Wilcoxon sign-ranked test showed that the pretest and posttest scores were significantly different at the 0.05 level. Interestingly, the qualitative accounts from the stimulated recall revealed that apart from the pictorial input the participants learned in class, they also employed other strategies to help them memorize the vocabulary. The findings from the study; therefore, shed lights on cognitive-metacognitive processing and strategies an individual EFL learner adopted, and most importantly, on how teachers can encourage their learners to orchestrate them and make the best use of pictures in order to learn ESP vocabulary effectively.

The effects of communication mode on negotiation of meaning and its noticing

This study examined the effects of communication mode (i.e., face to face versus computer mediated communication) on the instances of negotiation of meaning (NofM) and its level of noticing by learners. Sixty-four participants (32 dyads) completed two jigsaw tasks in two different mediums (one in each) and four days after the tasks they were asked to identify the instances where they had communication breakdowns in a stimulated recall protocol. The findings of the study revealed that the average number of the NofM exchanges and durations of the tasks were higher in face to face mode (F2F) but the participants of the synchronous computer mediated communication (SCMC) group noticed a higher average of NofM instances (M=10.72) compared to the F2F group (M=9.13) and the difference was significant. Based on these results, we can argue that F2F promotes a better context for the production of NofM, but the SCMC environment leads to more instances of noticing.

Invested Mental Effort in an Aural Multimedia Environment

This study addresses the views of 9 students on the amount of invested mental effort (Salomon, 1983a) needed to effectively process multimedia annotations (pictorial and written) so as to learn from a second language (L2) aural passage. Initially, 67 college students in a second-semester French course listened to a multimedia based French passage. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four listening treatments that contained either no annotations, written annotations, pictorial annotations, or both annotation types. Follow up vocabulary production and recall protocol tests measured vocabulary learning and aural comprehension. From these 67 students, 9 were selected to participate in interviews based on treatment type and posttest results. After examining anecdotal information and test results of these 9 students, it appears that the amount of invested mental effort applied to processing different annotation types varied in its influence on their abilities to learn French vocabulary and on their aural comprehension.

Activating physicians within a hospital emergency plan: A concept whose time has come?

Background: Clinicians are an essential component of the medical response to an emergency in which there are actual or suspected injuries. However, little is known about the institutional notification methods for clinicians during emergencies, particularly for off-site staff. Further, there is little knowledge regarding clinicians’ level of awareness of the emergency plans at hospitals with which they are affiliated, or of their knowledge regarding the notification protocols involved in plan activation during an emergency. If physicians are unaware of how to respond to an actual or threatened emergency, the effectiveness of any hospital emergency plan is severely limited. Objective: This study sought to examine hospital emergency plans, institutional clinician notification, and recall procedures, as well as clinicians’ level of knowledge regarding the emergency notification and recall protocol(s) at the hospital(s) with which they are affiliated. Methods: Written surveys were sent to hospital emergency coordinators, chiefs of service, and individ-ual clinicians employed by a large, multihospital healthcare system in a major urban area. Results: We found that 64 percent of respondents’ hospitals had a recall protocol; of those, 53 percent required that the hospital contact clinicians, with 17 percent of those hospitals using a central operator to make the calls. Of the chiefs of services who participat-ed, 56 percent claimed to be very familiar with their facility’s emergency plan, and 53 percent knew that it had been activated at least once in the past year. Conclusions: Hospital emergency responders are not sufficiently knowledgeable of their institutions’ emergency plans. In order to ensure sufficient surge capacity and timely response, a tiered activation sys-tem, intimately familiar to potential responders, should be developed, taught, and drilled by hospitals to formalize physician call-up.

Predicting Learning from Text: A Comparison of Two Procedures

Much research focused on learning from text is concerned with the effect of level of information on recall. To determine information levels, hierarchical text analyses are used to parse texts, and a number of these have been shown to correlate with recall. This study compares two such procedures, the Johnson (1970) and Meyer (1975) procedures, to determine their power to predict recall of information from texts. In two experiments, a total of 194 university freshmen read one of two expository passages and wrote a recall protocol. These protocols were then analyzed by independent raters for the presence of information from the passages read. Johnson and Meyer analyses were used to examine recall patterns. The main effect of hierarchical level was significant for both analyses, but the mean percentage of recall increased as a function of hierarchical level as determined by the Johnson analysis and decreased as a function of hierarchical level as determined by the Meyer analysis. Implications derived from the study are discussed.