Enhancing Foreign Language Listening with Visual Scaffolds: Computerized Visuals, Beat Gestures, and Rhythm Annotation

This study examined whether three visual scaffolds—computerized visuals (waveforms/spectrograms), beat gestures, and visual rhythm annotation—improve foreign language (FL) learners’ comprehension of spontaneous conversational speech and whether effects depend on learner processing profiles. Two hundred Mandarin-speaking FL learners of English (EFL) completed a listening pretest, a Modality Preference Test indexing perceptual type (auditory- vs. textual-dominant) and Dynamic Visual Sensitivity (DVS), 20 days of training in one of four conditions (computerized visuals, beat gestures, visual rhythm annotation, control), and a scaffold-free posttest. Repeated-measures ANOVAs showed a significant overall Time effect, but no Time × Group interaction for total scores. When comprehension was partitioned by subconstruct, Computerized Visuals and Beat Gestures outperformed Control on Detail and Inferences (at posttest), with no reliable differences for Main Idea. Between-subjects analyses indicated higher performance for auditory-dominant and high-DVS learners; DVS amplified scaffold effects for Inferences. Results suggest that prosody-oriented visual scaffolds yield domain-specific gains under spontaneous input and are most beneficial when aligned with learners’ processing profiles. Pedagogically, FL listening instruction may be optimized by tailoring visual, embodied, and interactive supports to learner characteristics rather than applying a single scaffold uniformly.