The Effects Of Teaching Through English Movie Clips On Low-level College Learners’ Listening Comprehension

Under the theoretical framework of Krashen’s Input Hypothesis of Second Language Acquisition, the paper studies the effect of English movie clips on low-level students’listening comprehension. According to Krashen’s theory, learners will spontaneously produce the target language when they accumulate plenty of comprehensible input. The input should be interesting and suitable to learners’current level, and it can lower their affective filter to allow them acquire the target language gradually. As an ideal source of input, authentic video materials were widely studied and their effects were generally confirmed by researchers. But for low-level college students, who have been studying English for many years, research about authentic video materials are rare. The author conducted a four-month experiment, using simple and interesting movie clips for the experimental group. The effects of movie clips on listening comprehension used by the experimental groups were compared with that of textbooks by the controlled group.Subjects of the experiment were85second-year college students from two classes majoring in Golf, at Physical Education Department. Their English proficiency were at lower level with quite limited vocabulary and sentence patterns. Their textbooks were too difficult for them, so most students were of low interest and confidence. The researcher randomly chose one class as the experimental group and the other as the control group and conducted a pretest to make sure these two groups were at the same level of listening comprehension. At the end of teaching after four months, a posttest was carried out to compare the progress of their listening comprehension. Independent Sample T-test and Paired Sample T-test of SPSS software were employed to analyze the data. In order to find out that the two tests are of same difficulty level,10students from a third class were invited to take these two tests. The experimental group were also asked to take part in two questionnaires regarding how to improve students’listening comprehension by using movie clips.Results revealed from data analysis are as follows:1. Both the experimental group and control group made progress in posttest, but the former progressed more than the latter with significant difference between their results, which proves that movie clips can help promote low-level students’listening comprehension. 2. Results of the questionnaires showed that teaching through movie clips can increase students’interest and lower their affective filter such as anxiety and low self-confidence. And the proposed teaching model was suitable to low-level students so that their listening comprehension was improved.There are still some limitations of this study. For instance, the sample size was relatively small, leading to a lower universality of the experiment. Listening comprehension is only one aspect of language learning, and other aspects need further examining. Because of the limitations in the researcher’s ability, the scale and profundity remain to be improved. And other shortcomings will be looked into in the future.