The Effect Of Multimodality Materials On Chinese Learners’ Listening Comprehension

In the teaching of second language, listening plays an important role. The single audio mode, in which only listening materials are played, is commonly used in traditional Chinese listening class, leading to depressing classroom atmosphere and inefficient language teaching. Especially in the case of difficult listening, it’s difficult to achieve the "comprehensible input". However, the multi-modal language teaching mode, which simulates real language-using situations for purpose of cultivating language ability, emphasizing on using symbols like audios, videos and pictures to stimulate the auditory, visual and tactile system of students.Based on theory of multi-modal language analysis, a junior Chinese class and a senior one are chosen as test samples, which have great interest in multi-modal listening through results of questionnaire before test. During the test, listening materials are played in three different ways, which are audio-only, video-audio and video-audio with Chinese subtitle. Afterwards, scores of learners are analyzed and the results show that though improvement of learners of different levels varies, multi-modal combination is good for understanding of listening texts. For students of junior class, scores of video-audio group are higher than audio-only group, but less than video-audio with Chinese subtitling group. For senior class, video-audio with Chinese subtitle group gets highest scores as well, but there is no difference between audio-only group and video-audio group. As supporting material, video contributes most to understanding of listening materials for junior, while Chinese subtitle for senior subtitle does.Through interviews of learners after test, students of junior class prefer video when listening, but for senior class the preference is Chinese subtitling. Video makes listening materials more vivid and helps learners understanding listening materials, which relieves learners’anxiety, enhances confidence and enthuses learners, but they distract learners’attention. Chinese subtitle improves learners’reading ability, help establishing grammar system and verbal practice, but subtitle shift part of learners’ attention from listening to reading subtitle text.In consequence, when teaching Chinese, multi-modal materials must be used wisely, which means listening material needs to be optimized and correspond to learners’ levels, meanwhile learners should be active and live up atmosphere in classroom when teachers are teaching, after class learners should raise learning awareness, enrich learning approaches and utilize Chinese language atmosphere to improve listening and verbal ability. Hence, revision and integration of listening materials need emphasizing pertinence and realizing multimodality in order to achieve better Chinese teaching.