Employment And Influence Of Multimedia Devices In English Teaching At Senior Middle Schools

This paper is a research to find out how the multimedia affects students'test performance, especially in regard to their listening, speaking, and writing, which pivot upon reading. Through a comparative study of an average class which was taught in conventional ways and an experimental class which was taught with the aid of multimedia devices, the author found her students in the experiment class turn out to be autonomous learners with more satisfactory test results whereas the other class remain more dependent on teachers'instructions and fail to excel in test performance. It can thus be concluded that multimedia devices help shift the center of attention in classroom from the teacher to the students.The paper starts with a survey of educational theories related to multimedia-based learning. They are the sociocultural theory and constructivism. Then three phases of multimedia-based teaching and learning are introduced. They are the behaviorist, communicative and integrative stages respectively. This is followed by a discussion of application of the multimedia technology to teaching in general, and then a detailed account of the experiment made by the author. After that, the research results are presented, analyzed and, finally, implications of the experiment results for language teaching are drawn by the author.