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The Effects of Duolingo's Stories and Podcast Features on the Development of Explicit and Implicit Knowledge

出版	Florida State University, 2021
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=BXuHzwEACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋Some second language acquisition (SLA) scholars have characterized the astronomic rise in usership of language learning applications as a "revolution" of language learning (pages 25). Alongside this rise in usership is also a small but steady stream of research that has investigated the effects of these applications on user motivation (Isbell and others, 2017; Loewen and others, 2019), learning gains on collegiate foreign language tests (Krashen, 2014; Vesselinov and Grego, 2012) , and oral communicative ability (Loewen and others, 2020). This thesis investigated the role of meaningful input in the form of two new features of the language learning application Duolingo. The two under-researched features (Savvani, 2019) are the Stories feature, which is performed by voice actors and provides the learner with short stories intermittent with comprehension check and translation activities, and the Podcast feature, which are 20- to 30-minute podcast episodes told primarily in the L2 with no user interaction involved (Jiang and others, 2020). These two features offer users more meaningful input, which Duolingo has been frequently criticized for excluding in its curriculum (e.g., Crowther and others, 2017; Teske, 2017). To investigate the effect these new features have on users, this study utilized a quasi-experimental case study design, looking at two Spanish-L2 participants' performance on a battery of implicit and explicit knowledge tests over the course of a four-week treatment period. The results indicated a steady increase in both implicit and explicit knowledge for the Stories participant over time, but that the Podcast participant was too advanced to make meaningful gains on the test battery as a result of Duolingo Podcast use. Despite this, the Podcast participant still made meager gains in implicit but not explicit knowledge. The battery of tests also accessed different language domains such as receptive (e.g., reading and listening) and productive (e.g., speaking and writing) skills. These findings add nuance to previous critiques of Duolingo and Mobile-Assisted Language Learning (MALL) in general that posited that the primary outcome of MALL app usage is receptive explicit knowledge (e.g., Krashen, 2014; Loewen and others, 2020). First, it was found that the Podcast participant showed meager gains in the measure of productive implicit knowledge (the Oral Narrative Task) but decreased in performance on the measure of receptive explicit knowledge (the Untimed Grammaticality Judgement Task). Interestingly, the Stories participant showed a large jump of 22% in receptive implicit knowledge of Spanish (as measured by the Timed Grammaticality Judgement Task). Neither participant showed meaningful gains in the measure of productive explicit knowledge (the Metalinguistic Knowledge Task). Although there was a slight effect found for receptive explicit knowledge for the Stories participant, the data from both participants in tandem discount the idea that app-based MALL prioritizes receptive explicit knowledge, at least when considering these novel input-based features of Duolingo.