An Empirical Study Based On Multimedia-assisted English Listening Instruction

With the global economic and cultural integration, and the gradual expansion of China’s reform,English as a means of communication is valued by the public. Listening plays an important role in languagelearning, but for the majority of English learners in China, most students lack interest and motivationtowards English listening, and it is caused by many reasons, among which the traditional teaching methodis an important reason, multimedia-based computer-assisted language learning is the new trend in thedevelopment of language teaching. Since multimedia-assisted learning instruction has been provedeffectively in improving language learning across a wide variety of instructional settings and subjects, itundoubtedly endues second language listening learning with more advantages compared with thetraditional listening learning. Nowadays much attention is paid to the research of CALL in many countries.Listening is the input process of language. It is of great significance to the whole language acquisition.Whether multimedia-assisted language learning can improve learners’ listening ability is the focus ofthis paper. The present study aims to investigate the effects of multimedia on learners’ listening from theperspective of motivation, interest and listening strategy.A quantitative research method is adopted in this paper. The author first puts forward three questions:①Can the multimedia-assisted English listening instruction enhance students’ motivation and arouse theirinterest?②Under Multimedia environment, can students of the experiment group use listening strategiesbetter than before?③Compared with the traditional teaching method, can multimedia-assisted Englishlistening instruction better improve students English listening proficiency? Then an experiment isconducted to validate the above questions. Subjects are from two natural classes of freshmen majoring inChemical Engineering of Lanzhou Petrochemical Institute, one class is randomly selected as theexperiment class, and the other one as the control class. There are slight differences in sex ratios, theoverall English proficiency and students’ background between two classes. The experiment class adoptsmultimedia-assisted listening method, while the control class uses the traditional method of Englishlistening teaching. The experiment lasts one semester, and the author uses classroom observation,questionnaires and interviews, and obtains the following conclusions at last:①Multimedia-assisted English listening instruction can enhance students’ motivation and arouse theirinterest.②Under multimedia environment, students of the experiment group can use listening strategies better than before.③Compared with traditional teaching method, multimedia-assisted English listening instruction canbetter enhance students’English listening proficiency.Finally, some suggestions are made on the future of English listening instruction under multimedia, inthe hope of providing some useful reference on multimedia-assisted language learning to English teachers.