Lingue e Linguaggi Lingue Linguaggi 19 (2016), 23-40 ISSN 2239-0367, e-ISSN 2239-0359 DOI 10.1285/i22390359v19p23 http://siba-ese.unisalento.it, © 2016 Università del Salento INVESTIGATING STUDENT CHOICES IN PERFORMING HIGHER-ORDER COMPREHENSION TASKS USING TED TALKS IN LEARNWEB FRANCESCA BIANCHI 1 , IVANA MARENZI 2 1 UNIVERSITÀ DEL SALENTO, 2 LEIBNIZ UNIVERSITÄT HANNOVER FORSCHUNGSZENTRUM L3S Abstract - The aim of the current experiment was to test the teaching and research potential of interactive features of selection, deselection, tagging and logging in the analysis of reading-comprehension processes. To this aim, LearnWeb – an interactive platform integrating TED talks – was used to involve 25 Italian MA students of consecutive interpreting in analytical tasks gauging their reading-comprehension abilities in English. Their selections, deselections, and annotations were automatically collected by the system and manually analysed by the researchers. The analyses provided an answer to the following research questions: Was any of the tasks perceived as difficult by the students? How was each task faced by the students? How did the logs contribute to understanding the students’ approaches to the tasks? The types of exercises used fit a large range of learning scenarios, and the resources, analytical methods and results described in this paper may be relevant to anyone interested in discourse comprehension. Keywords: TED talks; LearnWeb; log analysis; text comprehension; processes 1. Introduction The current paper describes a tentative experiment in the use of TED talks and the interactive learning platform LearnWeb in order to investigate student choices in performing analytical tasks that gauge discourse-comprehension abilities. The experiment took place within an MA module on consecutive interpreting – discourse comprehension being a fundamental skill in interpreting. LearnWeb 1 (Marenzi, Zerr 2012) is a collaborative and multimedia educational platform. This platform is characterised by an iterative evaluation-driven design-based research approach (Marenzi 2014), i.e. an approach in which researchers and practitioners collaborate in real-world settings to cyclically assess and improve the functionalities of a system (Wang, Hannafin 2005, pp. 6), tailoring them to the practitioners’ needs. LearnWeb has been used in several and varied learning scenarios (Bortoluzzi, Marenzi 2014; Marenzi, Kantz 2013; Holdack-Janssen, Marenzi 2012), but never before in interpreting courses. LearnWeb has recently integrated a range of multimedia open resources (Taibi et al. 2015), including TED talks, 2 an open set of video conferences that is showing great potential as educational resource. Indeed, as several authors have observed (e.g.: Park, Cha 2013; Bortoluzzi, Marenzi 2013), TED talks expose students to authentic spoken material that is engaging in terms of form, as well as content; furthermore, they present a variety of topics (i.e., vocabulary), and accents; finally the videos are accompanied by transcripts and multilingual translations. These features make of them a flexible type of material. 1 http://learnweb.l3s.uni-hannover.de 2 http://ted.org/