An Empirical Study Of Applying Multi-Modal Input To Improve Junior High School Students’ English Writing Competence

Currently,cultural exchange among China and other countries is becoming more frequent.English which acts as a main media of communication is also becoming important day by day.That is to say,English leaning and teaching are becoming more and more significant in people’s daily life.Owing to language learning environment and exam-oriented education,a problem in students’ learning process is that students’ output skill is not satisfying,especially English writing.Because writing is a kind of output skill and reading is input,output skill is based on lots of input skill.But people do not know how to input information for learners.Luckily,the famous American second language researcher Krashen gives people a clear map.It makes people know about what language learning is.Language input plays a very important role in students’ learning process.With the development of Input Hypothesis theory,more and more attention has been paid to the theory.And it is used in foreign language teaching and learning process.With the development of multi-modal theory,more and more researchers view language as a kind of social terminology.Besides,non-language terminology(pictures,music,dancing and body language)is also a way of communication.Since multi-modal theory has been developed,it is used in every subjects which shows the feature of modernization.The research is an empirical study which is based on the previous studies and the Input Hypothesis and Interactive Alignment Model theory.It mainly focuses on two research questions:1)Can the application of multi-modal input improve junior high school students’ English writing more than the traditional teaching method?2)Which input modality do the junior high school students align with most in English writing in terms of vocabulary usage?The 74 research subjects are from two classes of Grade 8 in the Third Affiliated middle school to Inner Mongolia Normal University,in Tuoketuo county.Class 1 is named as experimental group,class 2 is called control group.Two questions are answered by using three tests and an interview.The study verifies the multi-modal input can improve junior high school students’ English writing.The interview results show that students align with visual and tactile modality most in terms of vocabulary usage,both visual and tactile modality can greatly help students acquire vocabulary.However,the student depend little on the auditory modality when they acquire vocabulary or something else.Some suggestions can be provided according to the results of tests and interview that teachers should make class interesting and use various modalities to make sure most of the students’ learning needs can be met in class.Second,the class should be student-centered.However,the study also has some limitations and recommendations for further research.The one is that the study just focus on one aspect of the alignment.The other is research instrument.The third one is the population of research subject.