The Linguist

14 The Linguist Vol/61 No/1 2022 thelinguist.uberflip.com FEATURES ENCOURAGING FEEDBACK Students were asked: How useful did you find the dual-coding exercise? Are visual stimuli useful when teaching sentence agreement? Maria-Elena Metaxas assesses the efficacy of dual coding theory S ince becoming a sixth-form languages teacher, I have witnessed first hand the challenges faced by learners in applying the correct gender/noun/adjective agreement in longer pieces of work. Marking revealed inconsistencies in the retrieval of abstract noun/adjective agreement, especially as we covered more topics throughout the year. I actively encourage a bilingual approach to teaching and learning modern foreign languages (MFL), using content and language integrated learning (CLIL), maximising exposure to the target language, and immersing students in grammatical structures and vocabulary. Allan Paivio's dual coding theory highlights the importance of imagery as a means of aiding content retrieval. This occurs by relieving working memory when presenting complex and conceptual ideas, as a way of supporting bilingual memory and pedagogy in the classroom. My interest was sparked at ResearchEd 2019 during a talk by educational researcher Paul Kirschner. It may seem that images are surplus to requirement when working with 16- to 18-year-olds, but without an immersive target-language environment, personalised dual-coded information can help. This is especially true when remembering abstract nouns, where the processing speed is slower than it is for concrete nouns. Paolo Fabiani's hypothesis posits that words such as 'table' and 'notebook' are encoded by our cognitive system, both at the verbal and the imaginative level, while abstract words like 'notwithstanding' and 'epistemology' are mostly only recorded verbally. 1 For this reason, it is harder to recall abstract nouns, which require learners to create schemata to support memory and retrieval. I decided to challenge my Year 12 and 13 students to code abstract noun sentences with the aim of developing accurate gender/noun/adjective agreement within complex sentences. In order to assess the results of this experiment, I devised a qualitative research study with a standardised grid framework. Students were provided with speaking or writing content to code. This was produced either as homework or in class under these headings: Gender and noun, Adjective, English translation, Dual-coded sentence with noun-adjective agreement, and Image representing the dual-coded sentence. Each student added a personalised image from the Teams Creative Commons Collaboration Space to help them remember the noun (preferably an abstract noun), gender and adjective to be written within a sentence. The platform has revolutionised MFL teaching, with technology-enhanced learning environments providing opportunities for learners to self-regulate their learning activities and processes to achieve the intended learning outcomes. 2 All of my students seemed happy to share work in this way, learn from each other and receive feedback. The personal touch Students were instructed to place the image and sentence in close proximity to ensure spatial contiguity. Depending on the grammar rules of the target language, the position of the adjective would also need to be considered within the dual-coded sentence. Students didn't necessarily have to use the most obvious image to depict the abstract Picture perfect in class? Students were asked: How likely are you to use the dual-coding method to support your learning of adjective/noun agreements? Extremely useful Somewhat useful Neutral Very likely Somewhat likely Neither likely or unlikely Somewhat unlikely

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