Abstract:

In the era of globalization when people’s international mobility has dramatically increased, Taiwan is becoming a multicultural country in many aspects: the industrial sector employs more and more foreign workers; the number of overseas students in the higher education institutions increases considerably in recent years; more and more people immigrant to Taiwan as a result of international marriage. Because of language, culture or other reasons, these new immigrants face great challenges when trying to become a competent member of Taiwanese companies, universities and society. Efforts can be made to help them solve the problem of adaptation through training or education. Because of its low cost and high efficiency, e-Learning shows great potential as one of the solutions to this problem.
However, designing e-Learning materials for the second language speakers places many challenges to the instructional designers. These learners have difficulties in comprehending the materials designed in the format used by native speakers because of their poor language. Including more elements, e.g. graphics, sounds or texts, seems to help with comprehension however the learners’ cognitive load will increase and learning effects will weaken as a result. Therefore, how to reduce the extraneous cognitive load becomes a central issue. Cognitive load theory proposes several guidelines on multimedia instructional design, such as the split-attention effect, the modality effect, the redundancy effect, and the expertise reversal effect. In this study a series of multimedia interactive learning materials for the non-native Mandarin speakers are developed. A formal experiment is conducted to see if the split-attention, the modality, the redundancy, and the expertise reversal effects can be obtained through proper instructional design. Implications for the design of e-learning materials for the second language speakers will also be discussed.

Keywords:

Cognitive load, e-learning, second language.