Correlation Between Multimodal Discourse Input And Oral English Output

Multi-modal discourse refers to the language above social semiotics, which constructs the meaning by social practice completed by two or more semiotic resources (language, picture, music, space and gesture etc.). In a world of global visual impact, multi-modality has increasingly become an indispensable part of our daily life; therefore, the study on multi-modal discourse has both theoretical value and realistic meaning.Guided by the new Proposed Teaching Requirement of the College English Course in the year of 2004, with students' adaptation to the multi-modal discourse in the new Computer-based College English Test as the precondition, the study takes movies as the vehicle, aims to analyze the correlation between multi-modal discourse input, namely, audio, audio+video, audio+video+caption and oral English output.The study is the empirical study which combines qualitative and quantitative study, with quantitative research as the main method. The experiment lasts for 2 months, altogether 32 hours of lectures,and 8 movie fragments, with 4h a movie learning. The 30 participants are from the College of Experimental Innovative of Northwest A&F University, among whom there are 17 boys and 13 girls. In order to make sure that the results of the experiment can be used for reference and others can repeat the experiment, we set clear operational methods from defining the concept, operating the concept to specific sampling. In the sampling of the study, 60 students were initially selected to conduct an oral English test, i.e., oral English pre-test. The results of the tests showed that the lowest grade was 50, and highest 80. Then 30 students whose grades were between 60 and 70 were finally chosen as the experimental subjects, and divided them into 3 groups according to simple random sampling, 10 in each group. The three groups of students undertook different tasks. More specifically, the three groups took three different ways of exposure to modality, in other words, Group I listened to the audio clips, Group II appreciated the audio+video clips, and Group III watched the audio+ video clips + captions. After each group were exposed to different modality, they were asked to retell the content of the clips respectively to see how much they understood the content and how influential different modality input was on students' oral English output . Each of them was marked according to their spoken English output. Two oral tests, namely, pretest and post-test were held before and after the experiment to the 30 students, the test paper of the two oral tests was from Public English Test System Level 3. The oral tests were graded by two teachers. One graded the student right on the spot, and the whole test process was recorded. After the test, the other teacher graded the student by listening to the recording. Take the average mark of the two teachers as the final grade. In addition, students conducted two times of self-assessment of speaking English by filling the Table of Self-assessment and Peer-assessment for Student's English Level provided by the listening and speaking platform of New Horizon College English. After the experiment, analyze the results of two oral tests and self-assessment, coupled with the results of questionnaire, with Paired Sample Test to study the difference between students' grades before the experiment and after the experiment, so as to analyze the correlation between multi-modal discourse input and oral English output.The results of the study show that the multi-modal discourse input can improve students' oral English level, specifically, the three forms of modalities played a significant role in promoting students' oral English. Among which the modality of "audio + video + caption" improved students' marks most significantly, with a 5.4 promotion value on the average after the input. By contrast, the modality of "audio + video" ranked the second, which improved 3.3 on average. By contrast, the modality of "audio" played less significant role in improving students' oral marks, which was 1.7. The further analysis reveals that the Eta coefficient is 0.955; Eta2 coefficient is 0.913, which indicates that there is a strong positive correlation between modality and students' marks promotion value after modality input. If using the combination of modalities to improve students' oral marks, 91.3% of the difference can be deduced, which also shows that the modalities played a significant role in improving students'oral marks? Furthermore, the results of the questionnaire also reveal that students are supportive about the teaching method used in the experiment, believing that the method can stimulate their learning enthusiasm and interest. The result of the self-assessment also indicates that students' communicative ability was enhanced after the experiment.However, the study also has its limitations and deficiency. For example, the sample number is small, and the English proficiency of the sample students are relatively higher than students from ordinary classes, so the results cannot infer the overall and whether it can be universally applied needs further research, which needs long-term practice of accumulating data.In short, the study shows the multimodal discourse input can improve students'oral English to some extent, stimulate students'learning motives and make them more active. The data also reveals that it is feasible to study the correlation between multimodal discourse and oral English output, therefore, the subjects of the experiment should be expanded to a larger range, and the experimental time should be lengthened in the future so as to study further the correlation between the two.