Vocabulary Learning Video Development

DESIGNING EFFECTIVE VOCABULARY VIDEOS: COMPARING ANIMATED AND LIVE-ACTION MOVIES

As part of the project to create short skit-based movies for teaching English vocabulary words, 3 styles of videos were created – (a) animation movies with animated 3D characters with text-to-speech voices, (b) animation movies with animated 3D characters with human voices, and (c) live-action movies with human actors. An online study was conducted to examine whether different video styles would produce different vocabulary learning outcomes and different levels of learner engagement. There were no differences among the 3 groups on their vocabulary learning outcomes.

Study participants were recruited from 18 in-person and online course sections from 8 disciplines and through the newsletters at 4 university departments and offices. Below are examples of my recruitment materials.

I selected 82 uncommon and rare English words from the Advanced GRE vocabulary list by Magoosh that only appeared in COCA database 100 times or less (extremely rare). The corpus contains more than one billion words of text (25+ million words each year 1990-2019) from eight genres: spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, academic texts, and (with the update in March 2020): TV and Movies subtitles, blogs, and other web pages.

I also surveyed 16 adult Native English speakers from different occupational backgrounds and age groups and narrowed down the list to the 24 extremely difficult (rarely known) GRE words below. 

I created a total of 30 short (1-2 minutes) vocabulary videos according to the design guidelines I had established. You can watch them from the link below.

In each video, a target word and its meaning and usage are illustrated through a short 1-2 minutes movie skit. Each skit was written to include the same set of context clues - when, where and why, who says what to whom and how it is said (6W1H). All other instructional and design elements were kept identical across all movies to ensure the instrument reliability.

I used a variety of free and paid tools for the entire production process from script writing to the final movie post-production. Some of the tools I used include Writer Duet for writing scripts, Plotagon for producing animation movies, and MS Azure Audio Content Creation for producing TTS audio. 

Four tests and one survey were created to check the participant's prior vocabulary knowledge, check their understanding, test their vocabulary retention, and their engagement levels with the video content.

No significant differences in vocabulary learning outcomes were found among the three learning conditions. Considering the production time and cost for making animation movies and live-action movies, animation movie is a more feasible option for instructors working with limited time and budget. See the links below for more information.