A Study of Multimodal Effects on ESP Listening Comprehension

This study inquires into the effect of multimodality on ESP listening comprehension by examining the students' English summaries of the audiovisual recording material that comprises 51 semantic units. The study objects are 120 randomly chosen pilot cadets, who are split evenly into 4 groups: 1 control group and 3 test groups. For each group, the material is presented three times but with a different combination of multimodal. Then by using SPSS (17.0), single factor ANOVA and Post Hoc multiple tests are applied to analyze the collected data so as to find out effects of multimodality on ESP listening teaching. The study indicates that proper use of multimodality can significantly improve students' listening comprehension and visual modality has to correspond to audio modality information in order to produce desired effects. The study also demonstrates that target language subtitles are more helpful than native ones for listening comprehension.