An Experimental Study On College English Teaching In Visual-audio-oral Course Based On Multimodality

Nowadays, developing students’ ability to use English in a well-rounded way is thepriority of College English teaching in China, with importance attached to improvingtheir ability of listening and speaking. However, students’ improvement of listeningcomprehension competence and oral proficiency is not sufficient, due to the lack ofrelatively more efficient teaching methods to teach English in visual-audio-oral course.Therefore, to optimize the teaching and learning in visual-audio-oral course is of greatimportance to facilitate cultivating students’ listening and speaking abilities.In the last few decades, the development of computer and information technologyhas brought about more advanced instruments and methods for teaching. At the sametime, the emergence of a variety of modes in making meanings results in a possibility toadopt new approaches to language teaching and learning to make students engagemeaningfully in multimodal social communication. Therefore, researchers and teachershave come to explore teaching language from the perspective of multimodality, aiming toimprove the effectiveness of language teaching and learning.Based on the theories of Systemic Functional Linguistics, Social Semiotics and InputEnhancement, the present study explores the teaching with the application ofmultimodality in visual-audio-oral course. In the process of language teaching andlearning, multimodality refers to the communication in which input and outputinformation is conveyed through multiple modes, with the engagement of multiple sensoryorgans. As the purpose of the study is to explore an efficient method of College Englishteaching in visual-audio-oral course, one of the research questions is to testify theeffectiveness of the teaching with the application of multimodality in terms of improvingstudents’ listening comprehension competence, oral English proficiency, as well asoffering students more satisfaction of the course. The other research question is to provewhether the teaching with the application of multimodality is superior to the presentmultimedia teaching.Comparative study is conducted between the multimodal teaching and the presentmultimedia teaching. A16-week teaching experiment was conducted in an institute, and118freshmen participated in the experiment. The participants taught by the author weredivided into two groups according to their natural classes: the experimental group taught by the multimodal teaching and the control group taught by the present multimediateaching.After the analysis of the collected data, the present study gets the following findings:(1) Students’ achievements in post-tests improve greatly after receiving the multimodalteaching, which indicates the teaching with the application of multimodality attains thegoal of improving students’ language ability in terms of listening comprehensioncompetence and oral proficiency.(2) On the whole, students are interested in andsatisfied with the visual-audio-oral course with the multimodal teaching.(3) Students inthe experimental group are motivated to do more listening and speaking outside class,which means the multimodal teaching is beneficial not only to teaching in class but alsoto students’ autonomous learning outside class.The research has proved that the multimodal teaching and learning invisual-audio-oral course is effective and superior to the present multimedia teaching, andtherefore it may offer some implications for College English teaching in future.