Impact Of Multimodality Inputs On English Majors’ Listening Comprehension:an Empirical Study

This thesis mainly studies the impacts of multimodality inputs on English majors’ listening comprehension. Listening, as students’ important language learning ability which can not be ignored, plays an extremely important role in classroom teaching.Based on multimodal discourse analysis and constructivism learning theory, this thesis aims to answer the following three questions:1) What is the impact of different multimodality combination inputs on students’ listening comprehension ability? 2) What is the impact of the English caption and Chinese caption on students’ listening comprehension ability? 3) What are the advantages and shortcomings of the use of video and audio clips for listening comprehension?This experiment chose the freshmen of English major in Foreign Studies College of Hunan Normal University as the research subjects. The author carried out a pretest by using College English Test Band 4 in 2014 to choose 20 students from each class and divided them into 4 groups. During the research procedures, the same listening material was broadcast with different multimodality combination and students were asked to write down a summary based on their notes. The judge experts, who were made up of 2 foreign teachers and 2 professional teachers, marked the listening summary in the light of semantic unit decided by them before. In the end, the author combined questionnaire and interview to analyze the research data by applying one-way ANOVAs.This study discovered that:1) The modality combination of audio+video+English caption, is the most useful for students’listening comprehension; modality combination of Audio is the second most effective and followed by multimodality of audio+video+Chinese caption. Audio+video (no caption) has the worst effect.2) Caption is a double-edged sword. English caption and Chinese caption have their own advantages and drawbacks. Generally speaking, English caption is the most effective to improve students’listening comprehension. First-grade students can be allowed to turn to Chinese caption for help sometimes, but they should realize they should try to get rid of it as possible as they can.3) Video clips truly can distract listeners’ attention and cause "division" effect. But when coordinated with the target language caption, which can counteract the interference of video to some degree, video clip is effective for students’ listening comprehension. Students can get a relatively real scene to experience and construct what they learn. Under the circumstance where the video contents are corresponding to audio contents, using multimodality can better help to promote students’ comprehension to the listening material. Otherwise, multimodality has no apparent influence on students’ listening comprehension or just is not helpful at all.The author hopes that this study can help English major teachers realize the importance of multimodality combination inputs to cultivate low-grade students’listening ability and also hopes that it can provide some references for English classroom teaching so as to enhance the efficiency of classroom teaching.