Visual Or Audio:Modes Of Input And Their Impacts On The Pupils’ English Achievement——an Experiment

As the necessary source of language studying, language input has attracted broad concern in1970s when the second language acquisition had been established. The most important hypothesis is the Krashen (1988) input hypothesis. In recent years, with more attention on the volume of language input, more and more scholars lay their interest on the difference of input modes and what impact they would do on the second language learners. Visual input and audio input are the most important input modes. As to the different results of the two input modes, Sachs (1974) found that reading comprehension tends to get explicit information, and auditory comprehension focuses on mastering the general idea of the text. Nowadays, children have a great challenge and difficulty--the influenced of their mother tongue. With their own characteristics and flexible tongue, children are. more sensitive to sound than to letters. It’s necessary to study the modes of input when we enlarge pupils’English input, and to research the relative between the different modes of input and their English achievement. The study mainly answers the following questions:1) What are the impacts of different modes of input (visual and audio respectively) on the pupils’English achievement?2) Which mode of input is more impacting on the pupils’English achievement?The subjects are40pupils in Grade5, with18boys and22girls. They ranged from11to12in age, and have learned English for four years. The subjects took a pre-test first. According to their pretests they were assigned to two groups:the visual group (VG) and the visual group (AG). And then all the subjects were input language materials4times a week after school. The ones in VG were input with visual materials while the ones in AG input with audio materials. Two terms later, the subjects in both groups took the post-test. The results indicate that:1) both visual input and audio input impact on pupils’English scores;2) the audio input make a greater influence.At the end of the paper, the writer illustrates some theories and pedagogical implications on this research, as well as some limitations and suggestions.