Abstract
Listening plays a vital role in the language acquisition process. Yet, learners think that listening is difficult since a lot of factors such as rate of speech, pronunciation, background knowledge, etc. can influence listening comprehension. It turns out that modality also plays an important role in improving listening comprehension. Research has proven that the more modalities used in learning a language, the better the results will be. Nowadays, with the advance of technology, listening materials can be easily obtained, for example from YouTube videos. Unlike the traditional listening materials which involve only audio mode, videos involve audio as well as visual modes. This study aims to discover whether audio or video modality in a listening test is more beneficial for EFL students. Moreover, this study also aims to find out the best way for applying multimodality in teaching or testing listening comprehension. This study used the post-test only control group design to measure participants performances concerning the two types of modality in listening test. The participants were 100 students of English Department, Binus University Jakarta. They were given two types of test: Audio listening test (ALT) and Video listening test (VLT). AOT was administered after the participants listened to a short video from YouTube (+ 5 minutes) twice, while VOT was administered after they listened and watched another short video from YouTube (+ 5 minutes) twice. Data were analyzed quantitatively to examine the differences in the effects of VLT or ALT on EFL students performance in listening comprehension. Moreover, a qualitative analysis of the results was carried out to find out in which aspects (vocabulary, comprehension, memory, etc.) students make mistakes in the test. Results showed that students performed better in VOT to AOT. This finding implies that multimodality can improve students performance in listening comprehension. Thus, the use of video materials should be encourage in the teaching and learning of English as a foreign language.
Keywords
listening comprehension, audio listening, video listening, YouTube, multimodality