Effects Of Input Modes In English Audio-Visual Class On Listening Comprehension

The effect of traditional listening teaching leaves much to be desired, and the modern technology of multimedia and Internet has developed rapidly. Under these circumstances, the English teaching mode in our country has continually been undergoing some reform, and the audio-visual teaching becomes popularized. By stimulating both the visual and auditory senses with various input modes like images and sounds, the audio-visual teaching broadens the channels for comprehensible input and tries to create an authentic language environment, which is welcomed by many teachers and students. However, there is still a controversy among some scholars over the effects of audio-visual teaching on the improvement of listening competence.To make it clear whether the audio-visual input mode is superior to the auditory input alone in traditional listening class, and whether the former can equally benefit the higher-level and lower-level students, this study conducts a 14 weeks experiment. The first-year students from four classes of a university engaging in their second semester study were selected as the subjects. Two of the classes fell into the experimental class (EC) and the other two classes fell into the control class (CC). Then, the students in the EC and the CC were further divided into higher-level group and lower-level group respectively according to the results of listening test in the final examination taken in the previous semester. The audio-visual teaching was applied in the experimental class while the traditional listening teaching was adopted in the control class. A pre-test was used to measure whether the listening competence is equally matched between the EC and the CC, between the higher-level groups in the EC and the CC, and between the lower-level groups in the EC and the CC. At the end of the experiment, a post-test was used to explore whether there was a difference in their listening competence. Besides, the Mean differences in the pre-test and post-test were compared between the EC and the CC, between the higher-level groups in the EC and the CC, and between the lower-level groups in the EC and the CC respectively to analyze the different degrees of change in their listening competence. What’s more, a questionnaire was carried out in the experimental class to examine their opinions on the audio-visual teaching.The results indicate that both the EC and the CC significantly improved in their listening competence after the experiment, but the EC achieved considerably greater progress than the CC. When further analyses are made, it is found that the higher-level students in the EC did much better than those in the CC in the post-test, and the improvement achieved by the former greatly exceeded that achieved by the latter. However, there was no obvious difference in listening competence between the lower-level groups in the EC and the CC either in the pre-test or in the post-test. Though they both achieved some progress after the experiment, their degrees of improvement were quite similar. Thus, the audio-visual input mode has a significant advantage in promoting the higher-level students’ listening comprehension over the traditional auditory input. But as for the lower-level students, the advantage is not that obvious.Through the questionnaire carried out in the experimental class, it is found that both the higher-level and lower-level groups held positive attitudes toward the audio-visual teaching. But in terms of confidence, captions distracting attention, difficulty degree of audio-visual materials and dependence on the visual aids, the two groups varied greatly. Different from the higher-level group, the lower-level group was not confident in their listening comprehension even with the aid of visual aids, and had a relatively higher affective filter; the lower-level students were more likely to be distracted by the captions imbedded in the video clips and paid less attention to the auditory input; in terms of the audio-visual materials providing authentic English language input, most of the lower-level students considered them difficult to understand; the lower-level students were more dependent on the visual information to understand the material. These above contrasts may be the reasons that result in the different effects of audio-visual input mode on listening comprehension among students at different levels of language competence.