Strategies and Challenges in Using Multimedia to Facilitate Language Acquisition in English Teaching

Abstract

In non-native English classrooms, multimedia resources often produce a cognitive gap of high input but low output: visual contexts and target-language forms fail to form stable semantic connections. To address this problem, this study proposes a three-stage multimedia teaching strategy of context anchoring, modal verification, and output transfer. First, a micro-context video library is constructed using word-vector semantic association, with target vocabulary anchoring the semantic field while 12-second clips control cognitive load. Second, a semi-structured virtual dialogue agent dynamically triggers recast and clarification feedback according to learners’ spoken output, grammar breaks, and pragmatic deviations. Third, digital narrative reconstruction tasks require learners to convert video-based semantic information into written storyboards, promoting cross-modal syntactic transfer. Experiments show that the semantic priming effect size increases to 145.2 ms, speech-flow break density decreases to 12.3, and average clause nesting depth rises to 1.89. The framework turns multimedia into a cognitive scaffold and is compatible with networked multimedia transmission, wireless interactive classrooms, and electromagnetic-safe digital learning spaces.