The Effect of a Native-Language Interface vs. a Target-Language Interface on Students' Performance

Abstract

The Internet is being used more often to help teachers of second and foreign languagesto create activities for language learning and assess their students’ progress. One kindof computer package used to manage various types of online course work is being usedever increasingly in language learning environments: course management systems(CMS). The choice of which language, native or target, to use in a CMS is a source ofdebate. This chapter details an experiment conducted to determine the effect of anEnglish and a Japanese interface on a CMS quiz module. The participants were 48Japanese students of English. To control for internal sources of invalidity, randomassignment was made and the design was a post test-only control group. The resultsshowed no significant difference in the scores; the English interface may be anacceptable choice for the interface language of the quiz module for those whose nativelanguage is not English.