On Multimodal Teaching Of English Listening For Non-English Majors In Vocational College

Listening is the basis of language learning,which relates the mastery of language knowledge and application of English language.However,in the traditional vocational college English listening teaching,overemphasis of language skills’ training and neglecting of difficulty of listening materials lead to students’ listening anxiety for material difficulties and poor scores in listening tests.Therefore,it is necessary to find a new listening teaching mode which not only alleviates students’ anxiety for material difficulties but also improves listening proficiency.The paper elaborates on multimodal discourse analysis at home and abroad,and current research status of listening teaching.Based on the theoretical studies on multimodal discourse analysis,it attempts to construct a model for multimodal teaching of English listening in order to relieve the anxiety and improve listening competence.The paper,thus,explores the following three research questions:(1)Can multimodal listening teaching model alleviate students’ listening anxiety for material difficulties?(2)Can the application of new teaching model improve students’ listening scores?(3)If yes,what contribution does it make to improve the scores of different question types among Response,Short conversation and Dictation?The experiment was undertaken among preschool education majors in two parallel classes of in Ningde Vocational and Technical College as research subjects.In the study,paper pretest,posttest,questionnaires and SPSS17 statistics software were put into use.The findings are as follow:1.It is found by questionnaires that multimodal listening teaching model can alleviate students’ listening anxiety for material difficulties.Material difficulties include the unfamiliarity of background knowledge or theme information,pronunciation and intonation as well as listening vocabulary difficulties.Applying multimodal resources(music,language,image etc.),creates original cultural background and help students understand listening theme;using multi-teaching methods(group work,imitation,retell,role-play etc.),gets students familiarize with pronunciation and intonation;employing multimedia teaching resources(courseware,blackboard-writing,pictures,gesture,facial expression,eye contact etc.)provides lexical chain and eliminate vocabulary difficulties.2.Testing statistics show that multimodal listening teaching model not only improves students listening achievements but also does well in the question types of Response and Dictation,except Short conversation.Multimodal listening teaching makes use of the cooperative function of multimodal resources,eliminate anxiety for material difficulties,and improve listening comprehension in Response.Dictation is too difficult to get high scores,which often results in anxiety.Multimodal listening teaching relies on the visual grammatical function of image to help students take notes,relieve anxiety,and thus increase listening scores in dictation.Because it is easy to finish short dialogue exercise with the help of keywords and little anxiety for material difficulties,the new teaching model makes on sense in the improving listening comprehension in Short conversation.The study aims to relieve anxiety for material difficulties and improve listening competence by applying multimodal listening teaching to non-English majors in vocational colleges.It’s also hoped to provide much revelation for teachers in Vocational and Technical Colleges.