An Empirical Study On The Effects Of Key Visuals On Different Listening Styles Of Non-English Major Freshmen’s English Listening Comprehension

In recent years, more and more attention has been paid to the cultivation of listening ability in the universityEnglish teaching. However, listening comprehension is a psychological complex cognitive process, it not onlyinfluenced by voice, vocabulary, syntax and other linguistic factors, but also affected by listeners’ worldcommunity information, mental activity, listening style and a variety of additional factors. From now on,numerous studies have been conducted to investigate the factors which influence listening ability. However, thestudy of the relationship between listening styles and key visuals is nevertheless seldom, needs to be furtherstudied. So the present study aims to discuss the influence of listening styles and key visuals on students’listening comprehension.The present study made use of a combined methodology of qualitative study and quantitative study. Andthis study expected to get some insights into the factors that influenced participants’ listening comprehension.1)Can key visuals improve students’ listening comprehension?2) Among the three different listening style students(i.e. analytic style, global style and synthetic style,), which group was influenced by the key visuals the most interms of the short passage listening comprehension? Which group was influenced by the key visuals the least?3)Was there an interaction between the key visuals and listening style? In order to answer the above question, theauthor used self-report, questionnaire, test and interview to collect the information and data.The results of the study indicated that the key visuals can help students to improve their short passagelistening comprehension. And the effect is better than the traditional method. For the three listening styles,namely, analytic style, global style and synthetic style are all exist among non-English majors. Analytic style isthe most widespread style among students; almost forty percent of all the experimental students adopt this style.Synthetic style is the subsequent widespread style, for synthetic listeners occupy almost one third of the all. Thepercentage of global listeners is the smallest, taking up only about one fifth of all the students. For students whohave different listening style, key visuals effect is also different. The synthetic style group is influenced the mostin terms of the short passage comprehension. The second is analytic style group, and the global style group isinfluenced the least. The finding shows that there is no interaction between key visuals and the listening style.