A Study On The Effects Of Different Inputs On Junior High Students’ English Listening Comprehension Ability From A Multimodal Perspective

In recent education research,English teaching from a multimodal perspective is a heated area,experts and scholars dedicate to explore and evaluate its role in language learning.Listening,as one of the four basic language skills,has been trained in a single modality for a long time in teaching practice.There are many problems exist in listening teaching,such as single input modality,fixed listening materials,and lack of real context.How to make full use of educational technology to improve students’ listening comprehension ability remains to be studied.In order to fully understand the status quo of junior high school students’ listening input modalities,and to explore the influence of different combinations of modalities on their listening comprehension ability,this thesis attempts to answer the following questions:Q1: What is the status quo of Chinese junior high school students’ listening inputs based on the China’s Standards of English Language Ability Scales(2018)?Q2: Do students’ performance in listening comprehension ability differ according to different input modalities? And what are the differences?Q3: Are there advantages of multimodal input in promoting students’ listening comprehension ability? And why?To answer the research questions,this study: 1)Collects 115 valid questionnaires to investigate the status quo of English listening input of junior high school students with the help of the China’s Standards of English Language Ability Scales(2018);2)Uses video-audio modality(VAM),graphic-audio modality(GAM)and audio modality(AM)to evaluate the effect of different combinations of modalities on junior high school students’ English listening comprehension ability;3)Conducts semi-structured interviews to describe in detail the advantages of multimodal input in improving junior high school students’ English listening comprehension ability and its reasons.The research results show that 1)In terms of input modality,junior high school students prefer to use multiple modalities such as pictures and videos other than audio input alone.In terms of input content,students believe that oral description is the easiest to understand while oral interaction is the most difficult one.Students’ self-perception in the six dimensions of listening input is at a low level.Obtaining and identifying information is relatively simple while understanding logical relationships and summarizing can be challenging.2)Students’ performance in listening comprehension ability differs according to different input modalities.Multimodal input of VAM and GAM are more effective while VAM works the best.3)Multimodal input helps to cultivate junior high school students’ English listening comprehension ability in the three dimensions: language acquisition,cognitive ability and emotional attitude.This research can help teachers,students and scholars to understand the actual situation of English listening comprehension ability of junior high school students,and puts forward suggestions in four aspects: highlighting importance to listening teaching,increasing input modality,providing real context,and expanding interactive language.