The Effects Of Different Modes Of Input On Senior High School Students’ Listening Comprehension

Language input has been widely concerned since the 1970 s.The traditional mode of listening input is audio input.With the development of multi-media technology,audio-visual input has become the mainstream mode of input in English listening teaching.Many scholars pay attention to the modes of input and their effects on learners’ listening comprehension.They have explored whether audio-visual input could improve listening comprehension,but the results are controversial.Some scholars(Hattori,1987;Hardison,1999)pointed out that audio-visual input could help learners better understand listening.Some scholars(Gruba,1993;Omaggio,1979)pointed out that audio-visual input could not improve learners’ listening comprehension and even impeded learners’ listening comprehension.However,research on the effect of audiovisual input on listening comprehension is still limited in China.Few studies explored its effect on senior high school students’ listening comprehension.Therefore,the present study compares the effects of audio input and audio-visual input on senior high school students’ listening comprehension.The listening comprehension test and the post-test interview will be used to explore the following two questions:(1)What different effects do the mode of audio input and the mode of audio-visual input exert on senior high school students’ listening comprehension?(2)How do the different modes of input influence students’ performance of different listening comprehension tasks?The subjects are the first-year students in No.2 Senior high school.Class A with54 students is the audio group,and Class B with 56 students is the audio-visual group.A pre-test on subjects’ listening proficiency was carried out.The results showed that the listening proficiency levels of the two groups were similar.Then students in both groups took a listening comprehension test.Eight subjects were selected based on their listening proficiencies in the audio group and the audio-visual group to take part in the post-test interview.Finally,SPSS21.0 software was used to analyze the collected data.The research results show that:(1)Compared with the mode of audio input,audiovisual input has a significant effect on the improvement of senior high school students’ listening comprehension.(2)The mode of content video input can significantly promote senior high school students’ listening comprehension.(3)Both the modes of content video input and context video input can significantly improve students’ performance of listening comprehension tasks of gist inference and visual relevant detail identification.However,they have no significant effect on students’ performance of listening comprehension tasks of visual irrelevant detail identification,detail inference,and word meaning inference.Finally,based on the research results,this thesis puts forward some suggestions on choosing appropriate modes of input for different listening comprehension tasks and choosing appropriate listening materials.