An Empirical Study On Multimodal Vocabulary Teaching In Senior High School

English vocabulary plays an important role in students’ English proficiency.Therefore,teaching vocabulary effectively has become the top priority.However,the hardship of vocabulary memory and tedium of English lesson have become universal phenomenon.In recent years,owing to the improvement of the science and technology and with the help of multimedia,people began to pay attention to multimodal theory.Multimodal theory means a phenomenon that use auditory,visual,tactile and other senses,and communicate through the language,images,sound and other means and symbols(Zhang Delu,2009).It combines qualitative and quantitative research.The thesis aims to check the efficiency of multimodal vocabulary teaching and students’ attitude toward multimodal vocabulary teaching by applying the multimodal theory to vocabulary teaching at senior high school.The author intends to figure out the following two questions in the present study:(1)Does the multimodal vocabulary teaching help to improve students’ English vocabulary proficiency?(2)What are the high school students’ attitudes towards multimodal vocabulary teaching and traditional vocabulary teaching?Therefore,the author conducted the experimental study of multimodal vocabulary teaching.The participants for this study were from Jiangyou Senior High Scool.There was a total of 120 participants from two parallel classes.The instruments are pre-test,post-test,questionnaire and interview.The experiment lasts for three months.Class1 is the experimental class,and Class 2 is the control class.Experimental class teaching is guided by multimodal discourse analysis theory,while in the control class teacher still uses the traditional way to teach vocabulary.The results of the pre-test show the vocabulary proficiency of the two classes has no significant difference.And after the experiment,they received questionnaires,interview and had post-test.The data collected were analyzed by SPSS17.0.The descriptive statistics,independent-sample t-test and paired-sample t-test were used to study the effects of multimodal vocabulary teaching on studnets’ vocabulary proficiency and their attitude toward multimodal vocabulary teaching.The results show that after the multimodal vocabulary experiment,the averagescores of the experimental class have significantly improved compared with the controll class,which shows that multimodal vocabulary teaching exert influence on improving students’ English vocabulary proficiency in terms of form,meaning and use of words.Therefore,multimodal vocabulary teaching has instructive significance for English teaching in senior high school.What’s more,the results of questionnaire and interview show that students hold positive attitude toward multimodal vocabulary teaching,while they have relatively passive attitudes towards traditional vocabulary teaching.But some students think the unique advantage of vocabulary teaching is obvious and must not be overlooked such as dictation in traditional teaching,which needs to be paid attention to and explored further.Finally,the author puts forward some implications about how to improve students’ vocabulary proficiency,which covers making full use of the multimodal symbol resources,like video,audio,pictures and so on,changing teachers’ role and combining both traditional vocabulary teaching and multimodal vocabulary teaching.In addition,the author mentions some suggestions for future study,including lengthening the study time,choosing a larger number of senior high school students,considering external variable factors and expanding the effective range of research materials.