The More, the Better? Effects of Multiple Modalities on EFL Listening and Reading Comprehension

This study explores the effectiveness of multimedia modalities by comparing the effects of the use of different modality modes on EFL comprehension. The experiment was conducted during the 2020 academic year. The participants were 186 college EFL students who were selected from six intact classes at a university in Korea. They were divided into six groups at random and received the treatment depending on their experimental conditions: text-only (TO), audio-only (AO), text-picture (TP), audio-picture (AP), text-audio (TA), and text-audio-picture (TAP). For five weeks, all participants read, listened to, or both read and listened to the fairy tales with or without pictures in class. To test the modality effects, the TOEIC-based listening and reading pre- and post-tests were carried out. The whole data collected were analyzed with SPSS version 20 software. The study found that using different modalities in classes plays a beneficial role in increasing comprehension skills. TP, AP, and TA groups improved their listening skills while TO, TP, and TA groups increased their reading skills at a significance level of .05. Statistically significant group differences were also found based on experimental conditions in both listening and reading comprehension skills. Pedagogical implications and suggestions are discussed at the end.