Analysis Of Multimodal Synergy In College English Listening And Speaking Class

The multimodality of discourse has aroused great attention amid the development of information technology,so Multimodal Discourse Analysis(MDA)emerges as the times require.Scholars at home and abroad have delved into the research from different angles since 1990s,forming relatively comprehensive theoretical analysis frameworks and research methods.MDA has also been used for the analysis of various multimodal discourses,such as advertising,textbooks,comics,posters,websites,etc.On the other hand,the extensive application of multimedia in teaching has made college English teaching apparently multimodal.Appropriate multimodal teaching can stimulate students' interest and improve teaching efficiency,but it can also distract students'attention without reasonable design.Therefore,how to reasonably arrange modalities and media in class to achieve the best synergy effect becomes an important topic in multimodal English class research.Based on Zhang Delu's synthetic theoretical framework for MDA and cognitive load theory(CLT),this study takes the teaching videos of the ten teachers as the research corpus who won the 7th National Foreign Language Teaching Contest(college English listening and speaking group)organized by Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press(SFLEP).The thesis explores the modal distribution of college English listening and speaking classes and the synergy between teachers' oral modality,body modality and multimodal courseware.It attempts to answer the following questions:1)What is the generic structure of college English listening and speaking class?And what is the distribution of different modalities in the class?2)How did the contestant teachers' spoken language cooperate with body modality and PPT(PowerPoint presentation)modality?3)How to improve the synergy of different modalities so as to enhance classroom teaching effect?This study adopts qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze corpus.The multimodal analysis tool ELAN is used to annotate and analyze different modalities,and the data is collected and statistically analyzed by Excel to analyze the corpus more objectively.The study has found as follows:First,the generic structure of the college English listening and speaking class with these ten videos is:class beginning,teaching objectives,lead in,listening comprehension,oral practice,summary and assignment,and ending.Second,the auditory modality has always dominated throughout the entire class,accounting for 64%.The teacher's spoken modality is the most frequently used,which is 201 times.In the modal usage of each teaching link,modal types and frequencies are the most frequently used in listening comprehension and oral practice stages.With regard to prosody,the most important one is intonation(192 times),and the least used is stress(12 times).In the body modality,the gaze and gestures account for a large proportion(100 times,86 times),while the distance is used the least.The most important courseware modality is the combination of image and text(12 times)and visual text(8 times),while the least used is the single image mode(1 times).Third,as for the synergy of different modalities,the auditory modality of teachers ' spoken language and the visual modality of body actions are mainly strengthening of complementary relations.The visual modality of multimodal courseware is mainly complementary non-strengthening and non-complementary overlapping or insource relations with teachers' spoken language.Body modality mainly expresses interpersonal meaning,and multimodal courseware conveys ideational,interpersonal and textual meaning.Fourth,there are mainly three strategies to promote better synergy between modalities.1)The strategies of reducing intrinsic cognitive load mainly include stratified presentation of teaching difficulties and gradually reducing instructions amid students' grasp of knowledge.2)The strategy of reducing extraneous cognitive load is making full use of visual and auditory channels,providing background information or components of learning materials,selecting typical and appropriate examples,reducing redundant information and adding signals,maintaining content consistency and relevance,avoiding separation of relevant contents,as well as keeping visual and auditory materials displayed in a similar time.3)The strategy of enhancing germane cognitive load is to reasonably arrange time and tasks for students to internalize knowledge and to put knowledge in different problem situations so as to promote the application and automation of knowledge.This paper discusses the various modalities and their synergy in the college English class,and puts forward some specific suggestions for improving the modal synergy.It has certain theoretical and practical significance.Theoretically,this paper verifies the applicability of the synthetic framework,and adds CLT to make up for the lack of cognitive rationality of the framework,enriching the study of multimodality in classroom.Practically,teachers can raise the awareness of multimodal use in class.The strategies proposed in the thesis can help teachers to better design classrooms and optimize modal cooperation to achieve efficient classroom teaching.