A Study On Oral English Teaching Of Junior Middle School Students Based On Multi-modal Language Input

In many regions of China,the cultivation and improvement of junior middle school students' oral English ability has been a weakness in our foreign language teaching.The traditional oral language teaching has focused on language output for a long time,but the effect of language input on language output has been neglected.Multimodal language input refers to a way of input by diverse language symbols such as image,language,sound,action.And this kind of teaching method combining mode of watching,listening and speaking can create a multimodal language atmosphere,providing learners with real and dynamic communicative contexts and rich language resources.This paper tries to apply the way of multimodal language input to English oral language teaching in junior middle school.And the following research questions are to be explored:(1)Can oral English teaching by way of multimodal language input improve the students' oral English proficiency?(2)Can oral English teaching by way of multimodal language input change the students' attitude towards oral English?Based on the two research questions,this study takes 86 students from two classes of a junior middle school in the city of Guiyang as the subjects.Each of the two classes has 43 students.One is the experimental class(EC),and another class is the control class(CC).Before the experiment,an oral English pre-test is conducted in both EC and CC in order to prove that there is no significant difference in their oral English proficiency.Besides,a questionnaire survey is taken to get to know the students' attitude towards oral English.During the four months' experimental teaching,an oral English teaching method by way of multimodal language input is adopted in EC,whereas a traditional way to teach oral English is employed in CC.After the teaching experiment,a post-test of oral English and a post-questionnaire survey are taken to make clear the changes of the students' oral English proficiency and their attitude towards oral English.Besides,12 students from EC are chosen for interviewing which aim to further investigate into the students' attitude towards oral English teaching based on multi-modal language input.After collecting the data,the author makes the following conclusions:(1)The oral English teaching with multi-modal language input has improved the students' oral English proficiency.The average score of the students' oral English test increases from 6.7093 before the experiment to 8.1628 after the experiment,indicating that the students' oral English proficiency has been significantly improved in EC.However,in CC,the average score of the students' oral test increases from6.6395 before the experiment to 7.3837 after the experiment,which shows that the students oral English ability has not improved so significantly as that of the students in EC.(2)After the multi-modal language input English teaching approach,the students become more positive towards oral English and have more interest and confidence in speaking fluent English.Because compared with CC,the percentage of agree and strongly agree in EC has a great change.Besides,the results of the interview show that the students in EC take more positive attitudes towards oral English,and they are becoming more interested and confident in their oral English.