| This dissertation looked at the concept of transfer within Mayer's Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning as a theoretical link between L2 reading and written output in order to shed light on the effectiveness of multimedia materials in improving learners' written performance. It was hypothesized that the mental processes of selecting, organizing, and integrating information present in the reading comprehension process would also intervene in the act of writing. In contrast to reading comprehension, reading to write in a multimedia context has not received extensive attention in the SLA literature.; An experimental study was conducted where participants had to read a Spanish short story during the regular course of instruction in one of four treatment conditions: no annotations, verbal-only, visual-only, or multimedia annotations. In addition, learners were given two writing tasks similar to those frequently used in language classrooms. The verbal-only treatment had the highest reading comprehension scores in the post-treatment vocabulary test. Given this group's heavy usage of English translations of the Spanish terms in the short story, their improved performance may be indicative of the method of memorizing vocabulary terms commonly used in the L2 classrooms. Contrary to previous findings, there were no significant group differences in students' comprehension of the story as measured by their recall in L1.; In the case of L2 writing, the results of my study offer partial empirical evidence that the mental processes present in L2 reading comprehension also apply to the act of L2 writing as the visual-only group performed significantly better than the other groups in the two writing tasks. I interpret this result as indicative of a multimedia transfer effect by which the additional visual information received helped learners take advantage of the dual coding nature of working memory to create a richer mental model of the L2 information. In addition, learners did not have to switch between their L1 and L2 language systems, and thereby, optimized their mental effort to store and later retrieve L2 information. This finding is in line with Mayer's Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning and extend this theory to L2 writing environments. |
