Resumo

Distance education began initially as printing materials evolving to television and finally to the internet, the most popular modality today. In the last years, Brazil has experienced a boom of this multiple institutions and courses in distance education. Therefore it is necessary to identify the effects of a foreign language in distance education to give support for those who design distance courses.

This work seeks to identify the brunt of a foreign language in the attentional engagement (mind wandering), learning retention and finally in subjective evaluations of higher education students, based on the experiments of Wilson et al. (2018).

Galusha (1998) divides the barriers against distance education into different categories. Firstly, there are the costs and motivators, the financial costs of study, the disruption with family life and the lack of support of the employer are some of the factors that hinder the success of learners of distance education. The lack of experience of newer distance students must be taken into account when the faculty is designing the course. The new student lacks experience and might drop the course early than an experienced student.

The participants were chosen according to their prior knowledge in the foreign language (English) due to the limited number of students who knows a foreign language other than English in Brazil. There were 3 lecture conditions in the experiment: 1. audio and subtitles in English; 2. audio in English and subtitles in Portuguese; 3. only audio in English. Mind wandering was assessed using thought-probes at predetermined points throughout the lecture.

All the answers were collected in classrooms for one week, using a print version of the questionnaire. The level of comprehension of English is high to all modalities. As expected, the participants’ evaluations had a negative impact on the modality without subtitle. The interest for the class was aligned with the subjective evaluation, therefore the modality without subtitles scored lower than English subtitles and Portuguese subtitles. The students also classified themselves distracted (mind wandering) of the class when it comes to the modality without subtitles.

This fact makes us reflect on the real needs of our education in the country in order to put us as good competitors in the world. A suggestion for further studies, it will be better understood the phenomena of a foreign language if it was applied in the real context of a class, in which the student was in the same environment that he is used to doing, as the present study was applied in a presence context in which all the students were in the same classroom and the video was shorter in comparison with an online course.

BATES, A. T. Technology, e-learning and distance education. Routledge, 2005. GALUSHA, J. M. (1998). Barriers to learning in distance education. WILSON, K. E., MARTINEZ, M., MILLS, C., D'MELLO, S., SMILEK, D.; RISKO, E. F. Instructor presence effect: Liking does not always lead to learning. Computers & Education, 2018.