The Effect Of Multimedia Integration Into English Reading Instruction To Help EFL Students Understand Complex Sentences

English reading instruction has always been an important means of language input in English language teaching in China, making up for the scarcity of natural language environment for EFL students. After a comprehensive review, we find that researchers have made efforts to probe into effective reading strategies to help improve EFL students'reading ability which directly influences their performance in various tests. Popular strategies include cognitive strategy, social emotional strategy, and grammar translation and so on. Some strategies emphasize meaning while others stress form. In recent years, the tendency in reading instruction goes as meaning prevails form. However, forms are the basis of meaning. Sometimes grammatical forms are key factors in understanding meaning, especially when the sentences in reading comprehension are long and complex. The complicated structures of long and complex sentences are headache for many students in reading comprehension. Methods of analysing long and complex sentences have been proposed. However, no research is carried out with multimedia technology involved, the new and powerful teaching technology, in analysing long and complex sentences in reading instruction. Based on information processing theory, the present research aims to find out whether integration of multimedia into English reading instruction can have effect on the students'comprehension of complex sentences both in terms of accuracy and speed.The present study adopts the comparative study between two groups: an experimental group which is taught using multimedia technology in an instructional treatment, and a control group which is taught in a conventional method. The treatment material is titled as The Three Types of Clauses Led by Omitted'that'. The three types of clauses include the object clause, the predicative clause and the attributive clause. Both the experimental group and the control group take part in the pre-test and the post-test. The total scores and scores of parts of the tests are compared between the two groups and within groups to see whether the accuracy of the comprehension is improved. In addition, comparison is also made between the speed of the two groups in both tests to find out whether there is any difference in time consumed to finish the reading comprehension task. In the process of data analysis, SPSS 13.0 is employed. Through data analysis, the major findings are found as follows: the performance of the experimental group in the post-test is much better than that of the control group. The mean score of the experimental group is 27.0667 which is higher than 23.6333 of the control group. The sig. value is 0.006. It is far less than the significant level 0.05, which shows that there is great variance between the performance of the two groups in the post-test. As for comparison of speed, the mean time of the experimental group is 22.8500 minutes while that of the control group is 25.3263 minutes. The speed of the experimental group is faster than that of the control group. There is significant variance in that the sig. value is 0.000 which is less than 0.05. This demonstrates that integration of multimedia technology into English reading instruction helps students better understand long and complex sentences both in terms of accuracy and speed.This paper finally reveals some implications for the effective use of multimedia in foreign language teaching and proposes some suggestions for future research.