Effect Of Audio-visual Method In Improving Listening Comprehension Of College Students

Training of listening is one of the main purposes of college English teaching and is also crucial for thedevelopment of English language ability of the students. The successful input of listening plays a decisiverole in verbal communication of people. However, for students of non-English majors, the result of thelistening teaching is not satisfactory.According to the working memory model of Baddeley “a working memory includes a visual-spatialsketch pad for the processing of visual materials and a phonological loop presented in auditory form forverbal materials”(1992:556). So presenting information in two sensory modalities (visual and auditory)increases the available working memory resources and facilitates their comprehension.The audio-visual method, by using the images and sounds to stimulate audio-visual senses at the sameor nearly at the same time.It use multimedia replaces the traditional tape-recorder, which can change thetraditional teaching mode, strengthen the understanding of the background knowledge, and broaden thestudents’ knowledge input channels, so as to form the automated habits of “stimulus-responding–consolidating” of the students.Based on the literature review, the author selected randomly two intact classes from2012studentsmajoring in art from Lanzhou City College to perform10weeks teaching experiment. The audio-visualteaching method is used in the Experimental class while the traditional teaching method is applied to thecontrol class and two classes are taught by the same teacher. Pre-test was used to ensure that two classes arecomparable in their English listening ability and post-test was used to test whether there was a difference inthe two classes. Questionnaire was used to investigate the attitudes of the students and the effect of theteaching methods. The results are analyzed by SPSS13.0.The result indicated that the scores of the experimental class are significantly higher than that of thecontrol classes. Questionnaires suggested that the audio-visual method can fully arouse the students’listening interests and improve their listening comprehension.