A Study Of Modality Effect On Listening Comprehension For Students With Different Academic Performance

With the increasing number of multi-modality listening researches,traditional single-modality listening has gradually stood in criticism.Different from traditional single-modality listening input,mainly stressing the importance of auditory-modal in processing verbal information,this paper was designed to investigate the relationship between listening presentation mode with different modalities including auditory modality and modality of auditory plus visual,and the listening comprehension of English learner with different academic performance.Based on the theory of cognitive load and working memory,the present paper aimed at exploring the following questions with the quantitative and qualitative methods[1]: 1)Do the levels of student's academic performance affect the listening comprehension with different modalities? 2)Does listening presentation with different modalities produce different cognitive load and result in different listening comprehension? 3)Is modality effect in listening comprehension significant for the subjects of different academic performance?The results of the experiment and questionnaire showed: 1)A significant effect on listening comprehension was found in students' academic performance.Firstly,students with better academic performance did better than those with poorer one,whatever in single-modality or multi-modality listening training.Secondly,for students with better academic performance,multi-modality listening training was more effective in promoting listening comprehension than that of single-modality,while reversed result was found in students with poorer academic performance.2)Listening comprehension with different modalities produced different number of cognitive load and resulted in different comprehension.Firstly,Multi-modality listening presentation utilized the advantage of dual modals(visual and auditory modals)was effective to reduce cognitive load than single-modality listening presentation with the utilization of auditory modal,but its significance in reducing cognitive load only was found in students with better academic performance instead of students with poorer one.Secondly,for students with high academic performance,there existed a significant negative correlation between multi-modality listening comprehension and cognitive load.And these significances weren't found in students with poorer academic performance.3)With the supplementary of pictorial information in listening comprehension,multi-modality listening training promoted listening memory for students with better academic performance,indicating the existence of modality effect.But for the students with poorer academic performance,listening memory was impacted by the pictorial interference.The result suggested that although multi-modality listening presentation utilized the advantage of dual modals in processing information efficiently,the limited individual academic performance affected the realization of modality effect in listening comprehension.