Effects of Working Memory and Different Modalities on Chinese EFL Learners#8217; Listening Comprehension 工作记忆和不同听力材料对中国英语学习者听力理解的影响 1. Introduction Nowadays, EFL education in China puts emphasis on listening, but the listening comprehension proficiency of average college students is not good. Therefore a research on the listening process and comprehension is very important. Many studies reveal that working memory is of importance in reading comprehension and writing. However, the relation between working memory and listening comprehension has not been well explored. At the same time, duo to the increasing use of video materials in listening teaching, it is also essential for us to study whether different modalities have any effect on listening comprehension. In light of the debates on the effect of working memory and different modalities on EFL learners#8217; listening comprehension, the present study is designed to look into the effects of working memory and different modalities on China#8217; s EFL learners#8217; listening comprehension. 2. Literature Review 2.1 Theoretical issues 2.1.1 Listening comprehension Listening is one of the four important skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing) in English studies. All language teaching approaches except for grammar-translation incorporate a listening component. The first thing is to know the property of listening comprehension. Second language listening comprehension is a complicated process, and many researchers have dedicated in it and stated their understanding. Clark amp; Clark (1977) thought listening was a process by which listeners came to an interpretation for a stream of speech. Rost (1990) held that listening was the process of perception and understanding as continuous, overlapping and mutually informing from spoken utterances after the words had been recognized. Morley (1991) considered that listening was the process which mediated between sound and the construction of meaning. Researchers have different understanding about listening comprehension, but they all agree that listening comprehension is a complex and multi-process activity. And next we will focus on the process of listening comprehension. So far, many scholars have proposed different kinds of models to explain complex cognitive activities in listening comprehension. Clark amp; Clark (1977) first pointed out the psychological description of verbal understanding, and then many researchers put forward their valuable models one after another. And some of them think that the process of listening can be divided into two stages. A first stage extracts the basic linguistic information, and then a second stage in which that information is utilized for the communicative process. Although there are many kinds of descriptions about the process of listening comprehension, the theory system frame of the process is usually in three models, which are bottom-up processing model, top-down processing model and interactive processing model. In the first bottom-up model, the listeners analyze the meaning of each word and then accumulate these meanings to form propositions. This model focuses on the smallest part and requires the high accuracy of the input. The second top-down model requires listeners to use their existing knowledge to predict the general idea of the listening content through few words at the beginning. This model adheres to the way of thinking from the whole text to small parts. The third interactive model combines the features of bottom-up model and top-down model. If one type arise problems, the other type will help to solve these problems, which reveals that this model is a complementary process. Meanwhile the features of listening comprehension should be mentioned. The first feature is that listening is a timely process. Listeners should make a reaction to the listening materials within the stipulated time and the chances are almost only once. If the listeners miss some key words in the process of listening, they can#8217;t trace it back, which may causes that they have problems in understanding the whole listening passage. But the situation in reading activity seems very different from listening. During reading, the readers can repeatedly read the text and adjust their reading speed. Therefore, the listeners have to spare no effort to listen the materials to get a better understanding. The second feature of listening comprehension is phonological traits. As Shohamy (1991) pointed out that the comprehension of the spoken language may be impeded by elements inherent in orally produced messages, such as the speaker's pronunciation, stress and tone, so that listeners may mishear the words in materials and finally fail to understand the true meaning. But during reading, the readers can easily identify word division and the framework of the sentence, and they can quickly select out the important information. 2.1.2 Working memory Working memory is the system used to hold and process new or already-stored information in a short period of time, and plays a key role in reasoning, comprehension and learning. Working memory was named by Galanter, Miller and Pribram in 1960. Later Atkinson and Shiffrin started to use it as short-term memory. Short-term memory is the capacity to store information over a short time. Nowadays, lots of scholars utilize working memory to substitute or cover the notion of short-term memory, highlighting the idea of dealing with information instead of passively keeping the information. There are many models about how working memory operates and Baddeley and Hitch#8217;s model of working memory is one of them. Baddeley and Hitch put forward this model in the 20th century, and the original model contains three main parts, namely, central executive, phonological loop and visual spatial sketchpad. The central executive is responsible for the information flow from and to its subordinate systems: the phonological loop and the visual spatial sketchpad. It can gather and combine information from various sources, coordinate the subordinate systems and shift between tasks or retrieval strategies. The phonological loop stores verbal information, and the visual spatial sketchpad stores visual spatial information. Both of them just operate as short-term storage centers. Baddeley added episodic buffer as the third subordinate system to his model in 2000, and this component is applied to connect information across domains to form integrated units of visual, spatial, and verbal information with time ordering. Followed by the brief introduction of the nature of working memory, the measure of working memory will be explored. The common measure of working memory is a dual-task paradigm which combines a memory span measure with a processing task. The first task of this kind was invented in 1980 by Daneman and Carpenter, called reading span task. In this task, subjects should read several unrelated sentences and bear the final word of each sentence in mind. After reading each list of sentences, subjects should write down the last words in order. There are still other tasks which don#8217;t have the feature of dual task existing to measure working memory capacity. And the features which a good measure of working memory capacity should have are still being studied. Working memory plays an essential part in EFL listening comprehension. In listening comprehension, listeners have to remember sounds of words as many as possible to do linguistic analysis, and their long term memories about the target language are used to conceive the meaning of the oral input. Listeners deal with information actively and working memory is one of the most fundamental parts in such process. However, Richards (1983) pointed out owing to lack of knowledge of the target language, listeners may lose information from working memory by decay and replacement. In a word, working memory, which is used to process and store information, makes a great difference in EFL listening comprehension. 2.1.3 Different modalities Nowadays both of audio and video media are used in our classes. However, more people prefer to use audio materials, and video materials are not that popular for some scholars think that these may make listeners feel confused. However, some researchers have different opinions, and they think video may have a positive effect on listening comprehension. Wilkinson (1984) thought that with video, the listeners can not only hear the speakers; he can see the speakers, the background information and the nonverbal communication of the exchange. Owing to the fact that visual image plays an important role in passing information, using video can make the information more accurate and lively. Meanwhile, the technical features of video (freeze frame, review, and preview) provide the teacher with the control required to facilitate listeners#8217; analysis and comprehension of the language presented (Candlin, 1982). This indicates that this feature of video can help listeners learn the language better. And Candlin (1982) pointed out that because video is such a dynamic medium, well designed video-based activities can provide an effective stimulus to take listeners from a passive listening comprehension to an active oral interaction. It seems that the use of video can make listeners become more active and dynamic in the class. To test whether different modalities will have different effects on listening comprehension, especially the difference between audio and video materials, an audio-only input was compared with a video input. 2.1.4 The interplay of working memory and different modalities As the technology of language learning advanced, different modalities have important potential to improve the way student learn. Few scholars have studied the interplay of working memory and different modalities on listening comprehension. Bower amp; Mars (1995) considered the presentation of multimedia accessed sensory memory through visual and audio channels, working memory is in charge of processing information in an energetic awareness, and long-term memory is responsible for knowledge over a long time. Mayer (2001) assumed that multimedia materials which were designed under the guidance of human mind work system tend to develop a more meaningful learning. From the above, we can find that different modalities may have some effect on working memory. 2.2 Empirical studies 2.2.1 Studies on the effects of WM on listening comprehension Nowadays many researches have devoted themselves to study the relationship between working memory capacity and EFL learners#8217; listening comprehension. In foreign countries, Zsuzsa (2008) made a research on the effects of working memory on listening comprehension, and he found that working memory was an important part in second language listening comprehension. At home, Gu Shanshan (2007) summarized that listening comprehension may be influenced by working memory capacity. She pointed out that a subject who has a larger working memory will perform better in listening comprehension. Wang Dan (2008) claimed that working memory had effects on listening comprehension, and she concluded that listeners with high working memory capacity performed better than those with low working memory capacity in listening comprehension test. Lu Ting (2014) found that working memory did have effect on listening comprehension, and in the listening comprehension test, subjects could obtain vocabulary knowledge by accident. And the high working memory group could get high scores than the low working memory group. Zhang Xin (2014) investigated whether working memory would affect EFL learners#8217; listening comprehension. He reached a conclusion that working memory capacity which was a cognitive factor was associated with EFL learners#8217; listening comprehension. The bigger the working memory span, the better the listeners#8217; performance. Above all, some scholars had already begun to notice the effect of working memory on listening comprehension. However, most of researchers now still focus on the relation between working memory and reading comprehension while the number of studies about the relation between working memory and listening comprehension is relatively few. Listening comprehension is an important field in EFL listening comprehension, so researches about working memory and listening comprehension are necessary. 2.2.2 Studies on the effects of different modalities on listening comprehension Different modalities can be a learning tool when people learn the second foreign language. Gallacher found that choosing visual scenes is a good idea. The more visual a video is, the easier it is understood by people because the pictures illustrate what is being said. Van Duzer (1998) thought that some interesting listening materials could arouse students#8217; learning enthusiasm. In addition, Hinkle (2006) claimed that choosing suitable video materials could promote the integration of language skills and change the form of classes. A lot of studies have investigated the effects of video materials on EFL learners#8217; listening comprehension. Chung (1994) studied the effects of video materials on listening comprehension, and he found that video-only group got higher scores than audio-only group. Arteaga and Andrew (2008) investigated whether video materials had impact on listening comprehension. They summarized that using video materials could improve listeners#8217; listening skills and pronunciation practice. Londe and Zsuzsa (2009) made a research which aimed to compare video formats with the audio-only format in the listening comprehension test. They made a conclusion that there was no significant difference between the means of the performance scores of the two groups and subjects were not influenced by the input formats of the test. 2.2.3 Studies on the effect of WM and different modalities on listening comprehension Although the attention on WM and different modalities and their own effects on listening comprehension were paid, the interaction effect between WM and different modalities has been little studied. Among the few studies that focus on this topic, Chandler amp; Sweller (1996) claimed that working memory could be promoted efficiently when materials were presented in more than one mode. We can make a hypothesis that different modalities have significant effects on listening comprehension. 2.2.4 Limitations of previous studies In recent years, the studies in listening comprehension get more attention, and lots of researchers start noticing the importance of studying the working memory and different modalities in the process of listening comprehension. However, there are still some limitations in the previous studies. On the one hand, from the former researches, we could find that the studies on listening comprehension are relatively few, compared with those on reading comprehension. Furthermore, there were fewer researches about the relationship between the working memory capacity and different modalities. And much fewer researches studied the effect of working memory and different modalities on listening comprehension. On the other hand, lots of researches just focused on the theoretical analysis of listening comprehension and didn#8217;t put them into practice. In other words, both qualitative and quantitative analyses should be taken into consideration. And attention should be attached to the possible factors which were easily to be ignored. All in all, there are still some limitations in the previous studies which need us to make a further research.