Empirical Study Of Using Multimedia To Alleviate Anxiety In English Listening For High School Students

According to the New Curriculum Standard of Senior High School issued by the Ministry of Education in2003, the goal in the basic education period is to develop students’ability to use the language in various ways. Most students in China receive a systematic English instruction when they are in the high school. During this period, the students develop their listening, speaking, reading and writing skills. Listening is the presupposition of the reading, writing and speaking, which has a strong effect on the grasp of the other skills. While teaching in the high schools, we often hear the learners complain about the difficulties in listening in their English class and it has influenced the English teaching effects. Listening is affected by the learner, material, environment and so on. With the development of personal computer of multimedia in the middle of1990’s, multimedia-assisted foreign language teaching becomes a new and important teaching method because of its rich capacity, vivid image and ease of understanding or remembering. English teachers are using display device to display image, voice, text, cartoon and so on, helping students to learn, optimizing the teaching process and improving the quality of teaching. There are many researches, some of which are about multimedia-assisted foreign language teaching at home and abroad, and others are about the cause of listening. But combinations of two studies are comparatively few.Based on the theories of Constructivism and Krashen’s Affective Filter Hypothesis, the author has applied qualitative and quantitative analysis methods to find whether multimedia-assisted listening teaching can reduce the difficulty of listening through its assisted teaching advantages and reduce the learners’listening anxiety which is caused by forgetting; and whether learners’listening proficiency could be improved by reducing their listening anxiety.The experiments in the present study were carried out in the academic year of2011-2012in two parallel classes of senior two from Guangzhou Fok Ying Tung High School in the course of listening, one class as the experimental group with thirty-five students and the other class as control group with thirty-five students. In the experimental group the subjects were required to teach in a computer-based multimedia environment, while the control group subjects were taught in a rather traditional one. All subjects participated in the English listening part of Senior High School Educational Level Test for Guangdong Province in2010. Scores of subjects’ listening were analyzed as pre-test scores. The self-designed questionnaire, the Foreign Language Listening Anxiety Scale of Chinese version was used before the training in order to understand the anxiety level of the subjects. The multimedia-assisted listening training had lasted12weeks. All subjects participated in the English listening part of Senior High School Educational Level Test for Guangdong Province in2011. The scores of subjects’listening were analyzed as post-test scores. Finally, the Foreign Language Listening Anxiety Scale was used again after the training in order to understand the relationship between listening anxiety and listening proficiency. All the data analyses methods used in this study were handled by SPSS15.0for Windows. The results showed that students experienced listening anxiety. The computer-based multimedia environment was more effective than textbook-based classroom environment for teaching listening. The learner’s level of anxiety could be reduced to an optimal extent and listening proficiency would be much more significant. As teachers, we had to combine multimedia-assisted listening teaching and listening learning, adopted flexible teaching model to design objective exercises, reduced listening anxiety effectively and improved students’listening level.