An Action Research On The Teaching Of English Vocabulary In Listening Based On Multimodality

To get around problems of limited listening vocabulary among students in senior high school,the study takes the listening vocabulary ability of students who are in Grade One of Henan Xinyang Senior High School as the research subject,conducting an action research on teaching of English vocabulary in listening based on Multimodality for nearly sixteen weeks.By well integrating multimodal theory with listening vocabulary teaching,the purpose of this action research is to improve students’ abilities of understanding and memorizing listening vocabulary.Before the research,the teacher has clarified the research focus by the implementation of questionnaires,group interviews,and listening vocabulary tests.The entire action research consists of two stages.In the first stage,action research has answered the questions about in what techniques to assist students to grasp the meaning of listening vocabulary.Enhancing students’ self-confidence in listening comprehension,strengthening multi-modal training of visual,auditory,tactile sense in listening vocabulary,and teaching strategies of listening vocabulary are recommended for teachers to help student challenge the new words in listening.The data in first stage is collected from several audio records,one personal interview(five people),four teaching logs,two classroom observations,indicating that: Firstly,the majority of learners are no longer intimidated by the listening vocabulary;Secondly,by auditory modality,students have a good consciousness of the phonetic form of a new word in listening materials and read correctly;Thirdly,students can well grasp the meaning of new words in the listening materials by the proper utilization of strategies in the visual and auditory modalities.After the first stage of the action study,students are capable of processing the listening vocabulary which is first appeared in listening materials;however,in later investigation,the researcher discovers that the phenomenon of forgetting words is more than obvious,thus most of the new words are not remembered through listening.Consequently,in the second stage of action research,some effective measures are taken to answer the question about in what techniques to help the learners memorize listening vocabulary they have comprehended,which includes consolidating the application of listening vocabulary in a large wide range of modalities,expanding the ways of learning listening vocabulary,and constructing a personal corpus of listening vocabulary etc.By reasonably organizing multimodal lexical activities,the researcher attempts to provide abundant contexts to increase the opportunities for the comprehensive usage of listening vocabulary,so as to encourage students to review and apply their listening vocabularies consciously.In the second stage,the teacher has written three logs,conducted interviewed seven students individually and four class observations has been recorded.In addition,the score of a listening vocabulary test after the action research is favorable and supportive for data analysis.Based on the comprehensive data analysis,the effects of memorizing the listening vocabulary is significantly improved and learners can effectively acquire the listening vocabulary they have met before.The statistics demonstrated in the first stage and the second stage of action research have proved clearly that the action research is generally effective: Firstly,the self-confidence of learners has significantly improved;Secondly,data of tests show that the average rate of listening vocabulary has increased from 24/40 words to 31/40 words;Thirdly,for most students,the effect of memorization of listening vocabulary has gone up considerably.The operational procedure of listening vocabulary teaching from multimodal perspective in this study is an inheritance and supplement to regular listening teaching as well as an enrichment and development to the multimodal theory.