Promoting Students' English Listening and Reading Skills through Multimedia English Teaching Methodology

The aim of studying English is to train the students' ability of listening, speaking, reading and writing. In these four abilities, listening and reading are the most important and difficult to learn. However, traditional English classes in Taiwan generally feature teacher-centered and test-oriented teaching. Consequently, TEFL faces a great deal of difficulty. Thus it is necessary to create an environment of language learning to arouse the students' motivation. Using multimedia to improve their listening and reading ability, it is the aim of this paper. On the basis of the evaluation and analysis of the students' current listening and reading learning and in light of theories on Multimedia listening and reading, the author applied the New Interchange Multimedia Audio-Visual Teaching Material in English teaching at Cheng Shiu University and explored the effects and benefits of Multimedia on students' language learning within 1 experimental semester. The author chose 1 class students that participated in the project of College English teaching and learning reform as experimental group and the other 1 class as control group in the experiment. The analysis of the students' achievements of listening and reading in the 2 exams reveals significant progress in listening and reading achieved by students of the experimental group under the MELRT system and students of the experimental group make significantly greater progress in the achievements of listening and reading than those of the control group. In addition, the author conducted research with questionnaires among students and found that listening and reading learning under Multimedia can cater for most individual needs effectively in their English learning, which further proves the effectiveness of Multimedia in the development of students' listening and reading skills in English learning.