THE IMPLEMENTATION OF MULTIMODALITIES AS AN AID FOR LISTENING COMPREHENSION TASKS IN THE ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE CLASSROOM.

Abstract

ABSTRACT Learning English within the Chilean territory has always been a challenge for students of all ages, especially when it comes to listening comprehension and it has been recently discovered that the use of multimodalities as an aid in the teaching field has been quite successful. Consequently, this quasi-experimental, mixed method study was aimed at finding the best combination of multimodalities in order to improve listening comprehension in English. Two main aspects guided our research. Firstly, the effects of different multimodalities and the combination of them on students’ listening comprehension, as well as the students’ own perception of their listening proficiency before and after the experiment. For this, three different groups of eleventh graders were chosen from two subsidized schools Colegio Alcazares de Ñuble and Colegio Adventista de Chile. The control group was exposed to audio alone, experimental group 1 to audio and pictures and experimental group 2 to audio, pictures and subtitles in the L2. In addition, a Likert Scale test was applied to measure the students’ own perception of their skills to understand audios in English. The findings of our research reported that the combination of audio and image were the most effective multimodalities, which also made a marked improvement in the students’ perception of their own listening abilities.