A Tentative Study On Visual Support In Beginning Chinese Listening Class

As learning Chinese has become increasingly popular in recent years, studies aboutteaching Chinese as a second language are being more valued. However, little attentionhas been paid to teaching Chinese Listening. The point of doing listening exercise is tounderstand the context, so as to reach the purpose of learning a language, that is,communicate. Therefore, exercise should be designed to serve this purpose. While therapid development of multimedia technology has taken place, audio recording is still themainstream teaching material in Chinese Listening class. Only a few studies have beendone on using audio-visual technology in Chinese Listening class in which practicalexperimental research in this area is particularly scarce. This paper is therefore intended toexplore how video would influence beginning Chinese learners’ listening comprehensionand how the learners’ would think about it through an experimental design on using videoin listening class.This study consist of two experiments that have been done on the internationalstudents who are taking beginning Chinese class in Huazhong University of Science andTechnology: The first experiment is dividing those who have learned Chinese for halfsemester into two groups. Control group uses audio reco rding as teaching material inListening class as usual, and experimental group uses video instead. The findings wouldbe based on their performance in doing exercise. In addition, two questionnaires have beendone in the experimental group in order to get the feedback from the students who haveexperienced watching video in Listening class. For the second experiment, an episodefrom the TV program “Happy Chinese” has been chosen as the teaching material of aListening class. Moreover, an audio-visual integrating with oral teaching approach hasbeen adopted in this experiment in order to evaluate if this is feasible in beginning Chineseclass. Due to the limited comprehensible input and output of the participants in the first experiment, the second experiment has been done in a class that is one grade higher in thebeginning level of Chinese learner. Apart from using questionnaire as the quantitativeassessment tools, the introspection of researcher and interview with the students after theexperiment are also included as the evaluation basis.The findings of two experiments are as follow:(I) The first experimentThe performance of experimental group is not better than the control group. Thereason could be students need more time to get used to the new teaching method. Anotherpossibility would be when compare to audio recording, the additional message thatprovided by scene play is not aligned with the test content or it is leading to the cognitiveoverload for students. Besides, when using video as teaching material of Listening class,the cultural differences of international students should be taken into consideration.According to the information collected from the questionnaires, more than a half of thestudents didn’t agree withthe statement that listening task is easier with the visualsupport,however, they believe that using video in Listening class would do more help for theirChinese acquisition.(II) The second experimentAccording to the observation during the experiment, students shows more interest inthe class that are using scene play instead of audio recording as the teaching material.They are more willing to actively participate in class. Visual support, such as the tone ofspeakers, body language and facial expression, offered students more information forcomprehension. It also made the conversation more authentic. As indicated in thequestionnaire, students hold positive attitude toward this new teaching approach, whichprove that students’ learning motivation could be raised by integrating teaching method.Nevertheless, the speed of speech and vocabulary could be a problem for students.Therefore, more factors should be taken into account when choosing teaching material,and teachers’ instruction would playa more important role during the class. Lastly, this paper offers some advices for teachers about teaching material andinstruction in class based on the findings of the two experiments. Some suggestions arealso given for the future researchers in related aspects.