The Effect Of The Use Of Video Text On The Listening Performance Of Chinese ESL Students

In language testing research area, how to design a valid test and how to elicit test-takers’ best performance and examine their actual communicative language competence have been the key focus. And also, listening ability and oral ability are the most important competence in real life, in which the listening is the premise of the communication.Video takes an indispensable part in language teaching class, in which some scholars think visual components of spoken texts contribute to students’ comprehension of listening information. However, because of some practical reasons and the belief that involving the video in the test may assess the pragmatic ability, video texts are rarely used in the language listening testing. In this study, a quasi-experimental design was used to examine whether the use of video texts in English language testing would affect the performance of test-takers. What’s more, questionnaires were used to examine the test-takers’attitudes toward the use of video texts.50students took part in the experiment, and they were divided into two parallel groups based on the performance of the pre-test. The two groups were randomly considered as the control group and the experimental group, and also the control group only took part in the audio-only English listening post-test, while the experimental group was presented with the same listening post-test in the video channel. The Independent Sample T Test was used to compare the performance of the two groups, and it was found that the experimental group scored7.9%higher than the control group on the overall post-test, and this difference was statistically significant. However based on the the questionnaires, it was found that the test-takers held negative attitudes toward the use of video texts. Therefore, the experimental results showed that the use of verbal texts improved the performance of test-takers, but they held negative attitudes toward the use of video texts because they were distracted from the listening materials by paying much attention to the visual images.