ID Brief for IST 526 Interactive Multimedia for Instruction

Title: Learning to think. Metacognition in Second Language Learning

Designer’s name: Giovanna Rodriguez
Date: 04/2/2019
Time: 5-10 mins

Problem analysis: Foreign language students at DLI, DLI graduates and MLI’s are required to
maintain their language proficiency levels. The ultimate goal is 3, 3, 3 in all the skills
(Listening, Reading and Speaking). To assure DLI goals are met, learners need to be confident
with all FLO topics and reach professional proficiency levels 2+/2+/2. There has been an
increase in the 2+, 2+, 2 goals in the Spanish results. However, content questions related to
economy and politics continue to concern students and instructors. In this scenario, students’
strategies do not work at higher levels, and they become overly dependent on the instructors and
tend to lose their motivation.
Along with target language exposure, listening, reading, grammar, and vocabulary strategies and
techniques, students require metacognitive strategies to fully understand their way of learning
and react efficiently when they face difficult content or when their skills begin to decline. This
training will furnish learners with a set of tools needed for approaching economic and political
content and become independent learners that carry their knowledge outside the classroom. This
strategy can be implemented with economics and politics activities (listening and vocabulary) to
address homework and before the Defense Language Proficiency Test (DLPT) and Post DLPT.
This interactive multimedia project will help students who don’t have access to an instructor or
are stationed anywhere in the world to be independent and foster the development of their second
language skills. This particular proposal is a small version of the one that will be presented for
the final Capstone project.

Target audience: The primary target audience is foreign language students and Military
instructors (MLI) who possess different levels of Spanish and job experiences at DLI. The
students can be in the third semester of Spanish, about to present the DLPT or in the Post DLPT.
Some of the military instructors are native Spanish speakers and teach Spanish, and others do
not. All have high school diplomas, many have college experience and degrees, and all have
some military experience. They are adults from 18 to 30, have computer basic knowledge, and
can navigate the internet.

Learning objectives:
Objective 1 Given pre and post-listening tests, foreign language students will be able to
recognize the efficacy of metacognitive strategies with 90% accuracy.
Objective 2 Given a systematic set of metacognitive strategies, foreign language students will be
able to identify the causes of their difficulties in listening and vocabulary with higher level
materials with 90% accuracy.
Objective 3 Given a systematic set of metacognitive strategies, foreign language learners will be
able to apply strategies that best fit the needs with higher level materials with 90% accuracy
Objective 4 Given a pre-training on metacognitive strategies content, foreign language learners
will be able to apply this knowledge to real life scenarios with 90% accuracy
Objective 5 Given a scenario, second language learner will be able to identify metacognitive
strategies that need to be implemented to improve proficiency with 90% accuracy

Assessment: Throughout the project, there will be multiple choice questions to check learner’s
comprehension with automatic feedback. To determine if the objectives are met, the learners will
do a matching quiz (scenarios and strategies) applying the knowledge acquired. The scenarios
will present situations typically experienced by language learning students such as not being able
to analyze and elaborate on topics such as economy due to lack of vocabulary and basic content
knowledge or not having the ability listen to main ideas and supporting details due to lack of
familiarity with specialized terms. The learner will study these scenarios and suggest strategies to
solve them.
Instructional strategies: Clark and Mayer’s Design Principles for multimedia will be added to
the design of this module. The module will begin with a pre-training session on metacognitive
strategies to facilitate students learning. The information will be segmented in small parts for
more natural understanding and reduction of the cognitive load. The language use and the tone of
voice will be friendly, and there will be an agent guiding the students through the lesson. Each
activity presented will be followed by feedback.
Students will not have much difficulty activating prior knowledge as it is described in Activation
stage of principle 2 of Merril’s First Principles of Instruction because most of them have lived
the experience and have background knowledge on strategies. This module requires learners to
apply the new knowledge to solve real job issues as linguists. Learners will acquire
understanding of metacognitive strategies in the context of the job-related problems they
experience daily. Also, Principles of Adult Learning Theory will be implemented such as having
clear objectives during the presentation, expressing what the training benefits are, making the
module relevant to their careers. Finally, the module will use some Gagne’s 9 steps of instruction
principles, such as providing feedback for all the activities and an assessment performance at the
end based on scenarios and the application of strategies.

Resources: The participants will require a computer and connectivity to the internet. This project
will be designed using Adobe Captivate. There will be images/graphics that help support
learning and a short video.