Effects Of Multimodal Input On Students' English Listening Comprehension In Senior High Schools

With the increasing application of multimodality in English teaching,it is of theoretical and pedagogical significance to understand the role of visual instruments in English listening.The nature and effect of different visual inputs and the interaction between multimodal input and students' linguistic levels need to be investigated to facilitate the use of visual mode in English listening teaching in senior high schools and to find guiding principles for listening material writing and English classroom instruction.There are three research questions needed to be solved:(1)What are the impacts of different modalities on students' listening comprehension?(2)What are the effects of different modal inputs on higher and lower achievers' listening comprehension?(3)How do listening materials with various topics affect students' listening comprehension via multimodal inputs?(4)What are students' attitudes towards multimodal listening teaching?This research resorts to experimental method.Students are divided into three equal groups: Control Group is the audio group;Experimental Group one is audio-image group;Experimental Group two is audio and video group.They are tested by PsychoPy 1.90.1 and E-prime 2.0.10 to record accuracy and reaction speed so as to know the effect of multimodal input on listening comprehension.Questionnaire survey and interview also go to analysis on students' attitudes towards multimodality and experimental process.Three research methods are supplementary to each other.Conclusions can be drawn from the data analysis:(1)Among three groups,students of video group have the best listening performance and that of audio group is the worst,which means that the audio-visual combination does help to improve listening comprehension.However,compared with images,videos can facilitate significantly students' listening comprehension.(2)No matter students' language levels,the multimodal input can play an important role in their listening comprehension.But the effect degree of multimodal input is affected by the language level.For lower achievers,there is no significant difference between images and videos,implying that higher achievers can be better at using the visual instruments.(3)If the visual inputs present specific information about topics directly and clearly,the topics combined with the visual input can help students a lot.However,the effect of images and videos is distinctive on these students,which may be caused by their ways of thinking,language level,observation ability,etc.(4)As the visual mode,the video is more effective for students' comprehension than the image.But for reaction speed,the image and video have the same influence.The visual mode can facilitate listening comprehension.However,for some lower achievers,too complicated images and too catchy pictures in videos can distract their attention.If the aural inputs cannot correspond with the visual inputs,multimodality will have no apparent influence on students.There are some suggestions for English listening teaching:(1)Students' linguistic proficiency is found to be an important factor affecting the efficiency of multimodality,suggesting that teachers and material writers should match students' linguistic proficiency with the difficulty of audio-visual materials to avoid the superficial application of visual instruments.(2)The nature and quality of visual instruments like audio-visual correspondence,visual information load,the definition of visual instruments,etc.should be attended to in exercises development so as to help students overcome listening difficulties and improve listening ability.(3)Teachers should attach importance to the use of multimodality and multimedia in classroom English teaching.Besides,the audio-visual rule needs to be generalized and audio-visual training should be put in use.All in all,to make full use of multimodality and multimedia in English listening teaching,the investigation into the relationship between audio-visual correspondence,different types of listening materials and multimodal input should be further conducted in the future studies.