INVESTIGATING STUDENT CHOICES IN PERFORMING HIGHER-ORDER COMPREHENSION TASKS USING TED TALKS IN LEARNWEB

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 TE
D 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.