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The Enlightenment of Input Hypothesis in Audio-Visual Courses

Author: LiuZuo
Tutor: LuJia
School: Ocean University of China
Course: Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
Keywords: input hypothesis comprehensible input context teacher talk inter-langue talk
CLC: H319
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2011
Downloads: 67
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Abstract

As an advanced teaching method, multimedia teaching plays an important part in universities both at home and abroad. It provides great convenience for classroom teaching by setting pictures, sounds, lighting together and creating real contexts for language learners. In English teaching, the audio-visual course is the medium which brings both the target language and the western culture into our traditional classroom teaching in a very vivid manner. This course provides a real situation to language acquirers with vivid pictures and authentic language that native speakers use.According to the present author’s investigation and observation, it is found that the function and effect of the audio-visual course presently done in Chinese universities have not been performed and achieved fully to the best. The main reason is that neither teachers nor students in universities pay substantial attention to audio-visual courses. Most of them regard this course as an entertainment course or a time to appreciate foreign films. In the author’s opinion, the audio-visual course should be an integrative part of the language teaching curriculum with its rich resources. It thus means that the audio-visual course should not be neglected at all. In this thesis, the author presents some new insights for the improvement of audio-visual courses, applying Krashen’s input hypothesis and other related theories of context to the area of language teaching.In this research, the author presents Krashen’s five hypotheses: acquisition-learning hypothesis, monitor hypothesis, natural order hypothesis, input hypothesis, affective filter hypothesis one by one and demonstrates how they work in language teaching especially in the audio-visual course. Input hypothesis gives teachers some enlightenment that the difficulty level of language material should be a little bit higher than the average level of most students in the audio-visual course. There are some basic requirements for language materials to be chosen and attention should be paid to the interest of the students and the linguistic relevance taught in class. To some extent, the understanding of the language input depends on the help of context. Therefore a thorough knowledge of context and its theories is necessary. The auxiliary function of context shows not only in pure language context but also in non-linguistic context. To be specific, non-linguistic context means the special setting and the cultural background embodied in the film. The film is one of the inputs in the audio-visual course but we should not ignore and forget teacher talks and inter-language talks among students as important sources of input. In films, the special language context embodies the character of the hero vividly and language acquirers realize and understand the hero’s intention and emotion more easily when they are immersed in the particular environment. Original foreign films can be considered to be the bridge that connects the language acquirer with the real input corpus. The basic aim of choosing a suitable film is to reflect how language is used in real life in a truly western cultural setting.The purpose of the audio-visual course is providing comprehensible and appropriate input as much as possible for the students to watch and observe which is taken to be the first step. The next step is offering teaching activities such as small-group discussions, role-plays, etc. Teacher talk and inter-language talk among students can be considered as a supplement for comprehensible input as well as the lines of film. Besides explaining relevant background knowledge the teacher also needs to watch and evaluate the students’performance in teaching activities actively. Teachers will try to use simple sentences or vocabularies to communicate with students aided by intonation, eye contacts, gestures, etc. The inter-language talk refers to communication among students in class. What it can provide to students are opportunities for negotiations among themselves with their own perspectives instead of only the target language and culture.The thesis is divided into 5 chapters. Chapter 1 is the introduction of the whole thesis. Chapter 2 presents Krashen’s input hypothesis and context theories in detail which can be used in the following discussion. Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 are the main bodies of the thesis which describe the three kinds of input in the audio-visual course separately. Finally Chapter 5 is the conclusion part in which the author points out some shortcomings of this research on audio-visual courses and some suggestions in future studies.

The Enlightenment of Input Hypothesis in Audio-Visual Courses

Abstract

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