Introduction. The usage of multimodal text in teaching foreign languages is a matter of debate. The research findings that study multimodal text are ambiguous. From the neurolinguistic point of view, the usage of audio-visual information is important. The aim of the research is to determine the influence of multimodal text on secondary school students’ receptive skills with the help of a teaching experiment. Materials and methods. An audiobook complete with text was chosen as the polymodal medium. The level of receptive skills was measured using the online eSELT 2 diagnostic English language test. In addition to general scientific methods, empirical methods such as observation, testing and a teaching experiment were used. Sample. The participants of the experiment were 11-12-year-old students of the 6-th grade (12 girls and 8 boys) of the Academic gymnasium 56. Procedure. The experiment involved simultaneous reading and listening (or listening-while-reading) books. There were three tests to assess students’ levels of reading and listening skills. Results and discussion. The results of the pedagogical experiment show that books with audio accompaniment are effective in the development of listening skills, but have no significant effect on the development of reading skills. The statistical significance of difference in performance in control and experimental groups is proved by the Student’s t-test. Conclusion. Thus, the account of neurophysiological data as well as the results of the experiment allow us to conclude that audiobooks complete with text are effective in developing the listening skills of secondary school students.
Introduction. The usage of multimodal text in teaching foreign languages is a matter of debate. The research findings that study multimodal text are ambiguous. From the neurolinguistic point of view, the usage of audio-visual information is important. The aim of the research is to determine the influence of multimodal text on secondary school students’ receptive skills with the help of a teaching experiment. Materials and methods. An audiobook complete with text was chosen as the polymodal medium. The level of receptive skills was measured using the online eSELT 2 diagnostic English language test. In addition to general scientific methods, empirical methods such as observation, testing and a teaching experiment were used. Sample. The participants of the experiment were 11-12-year-old students of the 6-th grade (12 girls and 8 boys) of the Academic gymnasium 56. Procedure. The experiment involved simultaneous reading and listening (or listening-while-reading) books. There were three tests to assess students’ levels of reading and listening skills. Results and discussion. The results of the pedagogical experiment show that books with audio accompaniment are effective in the development of listening skills, but have no significant effect on the development of reading skills. The statistical significance of difference in performance in control and experimental groups is proved by the Student’s t-test. Conclusion. Thus, the account of neurophysiological data as well as the results of the experiment allow us to conclude that audiobooks complete with text are effective in developing the listening skills of secondary school students.