Interlinear translations remain an understudied type of materials for reading instruction in a second language. This study reports the findings of an experiment using interlinear translations in a reading comprehension task, and the results using construed and columnar translations. Interlinears facilitated word recall and overall comprehension.
Translation in language teaching has been a source of controversial debate, nevertheless interlinear translations remain an understudied type of materials despite having been used since 1000 C.E. In the absence of experiments addressing their benefits, this study aims at exploring the role of interlinears in L2 reading. 100 participants were randomly assigned to three groups. The experimental condition read a text in English with an interlinear translation in Spanish, whereas the controls had to read the same text with the aid of construed or columnar translations. An immediate and delayed (8 days later) task were used to control for immediate recall via a translation task of the same text into Spanish. Independent measures ANOVA reveal a significant advantage in the experimental (interlinear) over the construed and columnar conditions, which is consistent with the hypothesis that interlinear translations allow explicit focus on meaning and word retrieval due to a reduction in the cognitive load.
