An Empirical Study Of The Effects Of Audio And Video On Senior High School Students' English Listening Comprehension

Listening as an input skill plays a crucial role in the development of a student's language.A student's ability to listen comprehensively is closely related to the listening materials they use.Listening is not just a test of sound information but also an interpretation of non-sound information.In traditional listening pedagogy,a student is only examined on their understanding of voice information.With the development of multimedia technology,language learners have access to a variety of audio-visual materials which auditory learning and visual learning are integrated.Although most researchers confirm their positive effects on listening comprehension,some studies have pointed out that video does not play a positive role in listening comprehension and at times it can even hinder a learner's listening comprehension.There are many problems in previous studies,namely,there is no good theoretical support,no clear classification of video information,no analysis of the students'subjective feelings and so on.In view of this,this article bases on Context Theory,Dual Coding Theory,Cognitive Load Theory and Affective Filtering Hypothesis as the framework to explore the effect of audio and video on senior high school students'English listening comprehension through empirical research.This research focuses on the following three topics:(1)The difference between the effects of audio material and video material on senior high school students' English listening comprehension.(2)Different types of video material,namely,the difference between the effects of contextual video and content video on senior high school students' English listening comprehension.(3)Whether the senior high school students' subjective benefit from video materials is related to their listening scores or not.In this study,two classes of students at a key senior high school in Wuhan were selected as the experimental subject.There were 113 students divided into two groups,a video group and an audio group and this experiment lasted for one semester.The experiment is divided into two parts,listening tests and questionnaires.Listening test are all multiple choice questions including the main topic tasks,detailed-information questions,and reasoning questions.The questionnaire contains 13 statements aimed at investigating students' subjective benefits from using video information as listening material.The research results show that:(1)There is no significant difference between audio material and video material with respect to the improvement of English listening comprehension performance of senior high school students.(2)Different types of video material,that is,contextual video and content video have significant differences on senior high school students' English listening comprehension.Content video can significantly improve senior high school students' English listening comprehension.(3)Senior high school students' subjective benefit from content video material is correlated with their corresponding listening scores.The survey results from questionnaire show that most students hold a positive attitude towards the role of video information in listening comprehension.The findings of this paper have a positive reference value for English listening teaching and English listening test design.