The Impact of Content Visuals on Listening Comprehension Ability of Iranian EFL Learners

Abstract

Listening comprehension is the skill which must be worked on from the beginning of language instruction since its improvement closely aids the improvement of the oral production. But it seems that both language learners and teachers face great difficulties working on this skill. For language teachers it is difficult since there are no exact rules to teach it as there are rules for grammar and writing and for learners it is difficult since working on listening is a tiring task. On the other hand, the tendency toward the use of the visuals in listening comprehension programs has been increasing in recent years. It seems that visuals, mainly in the form of videos and pictures have won interests in such a way that teachers devote most of their listening classes’ times to movies. But there are still doubts about the effectiveness of videos and pictures and about their superiority to audio-only materials. Therefore, this study was done to uncover the power of content visuals in the form of videos and pictures in improving listening comprehension ability. In fact, it was done to reveal if there was any difference between the use of content visuals (videos and pictures) and audio-only materials in case of their effectiveness in improving listening comprehension ability. To do so, the researchers selected eighty female and male English learners and randomly divided them into four groups of twenty and each group attended a computer-based listening test to accredit the homogeneity. Then each group received some sort of instructions. It means that each group was instructed, using a special type of listening material. At the end of the instruction, the participants sat for the post-test, which was again a computerized version of TOEFL-IBT test. After the analysis of the data, it was revealed that there is no significant difference between the use of content visuals (videos and pictures) and audio-only materials in listening programs. In fact, the results suggested that picture-audio materials are a bit more powerful than both videos and audio-only materials, and videos proved to be the weakest format among all. However, the differences were scant but they are not negligible and language teachers must keep this fact in mind that videos do not work as well as pictures and audio-only materials