An Experimental Study Of The Effects Of Multimodal Teaching Of English Grammar On Junior Middle School Students

Grammar is the core of language system and plays an important role in the process of second language teaching.However,the current junior middle school students are not interested in learning English grammar because it is difficult to learn for them.Many teachers think the teaching efficiency of English grammar needs to be improved.Therefore,it is urgent to find an effective way to teach grammar which can meet the needs of teachers and students.With the development of multimedia technology,more and more attention has been paid to the multimodal teaching which refers to the application of audio,video and other modes in a rational way in the process of classroom teaching to stimulate students’ interest in learning,so as to improve the teaching efficiency.Based on the theory of intersemiotic complementarity put forward by Royce(2007)and constructivism,this experimental study attempts to apply multimodal teaching into English grammar of junior middle school to explore a new way for grammar teaching.Two research questions are included: 1)Can multimodal English grammar teaching improve the English grammatical competence of junior middle school students? 2)Can multimodal English grammar teaching improve junior middle school students’ interest in English grammar learning?Sixty Five students from two parallel classes of a foreign languages school in Guangzhou were selected as subjects.The instruments of this study include tests,questionnaires and interviews.Two classes were randomly selected as the experimental group and the control group to carry out an 11-week teaching intervention.The multimodal grammar teaching and traditional grammar teaching(induction)was adopted respectively by EG and CG to teach three grammar points : countable and uncountable nouns,the simple future tense and conditional sentences.Pre-test and pre-questionnaire were conducted in EG and CG before teaching intervention.After teaching intervention,the students of EG and CG were required to finish post-test and post-questionnaire.Then,six students in EG were interviewed.The scores of tests and data of questionnaire were analyzed by T-test,and the data of interviews were analyzed and showed in forms.The results of tests showed that multimodal teaching of English grammar can improve grammatical competence of students(t=-2.11,df=63,p=.038<.05).And the results of questionnaires demonstrated that multimodal teaching of English grammar can improve junior middle school students’ interest in English grammar learning(t=-9.637,df=63,p=.000<.05).The results of interviews further demenstrated that the multimodal teaching of English grammar can improve junior middle school students’ interest in English grammar learning.The results of the research indicated that multimodal teaching of English grammar can meet the needs of teachers and students for grammar teaching,which opens up a new way for grammar teaching in junior middle school,and also provides some references for further study on English grammar teaching.