Research On The Effects Of Multimodal Teaching Approach On Senior High School Students’ English Writing Proficiency And Writing Motivation

English learning skills include listening,speaking,reading,viewing,and writing.Among them,writing is one of the important indexes for detecting students’ English level,and it is also the focus and difficulty in English teaching and learning.The requirements of the new English curriculum standard for English writing in 2017 are that students can write coherent and structured short essays,to express their opinions and attitudes.It can be seen that language input is the basis for improving English writing.In the era of highly developed information technology,teachers should actively use such sources of information as pictures,music,and videos to expand the channels for students to learn and use English so that writing teaching effect can be maximized.Multimodal teaching approach is a construct based on the theory of social semiotics.It attaches importance to learn through multiple symbolic resources.It advocates the use of pictures,music,videos and other teaching methods to mobilize students’ various senses so as to mobilize students to participate in language learning and achieve the ideal teaching and learning effect.Although the research on multimodal teaching is increasing,the application of multimodal teaching approach to writing is rare.The effectiveness of multimodal writing teaching in senior high school English classes remains unsolved to some extent.Therefore,this study raises the following three research questions to further explore the effects of multimodal teaching in English writing teaching.(1)What are the effects of multimodal teaching approach on students’English writing proficiency?(2)What are the effects of multimodal teaching approach on students’ English writing motivation?(3)What are the strengths and weaknesses of multimodal writing teaching?The teaching experiment of this research lasted for four months.Two parallel classes participated in the teaching experiment.Class 14 was chosen randomly as the control class and class 15 the experimental class.The total number of the participants was 102,with 51 in the experimental class and 51 in the control class.Before the experiment,both classes participated in the pre-test and pre-questionnaire to testify whether there was a significant difference in their English writing proficiency and writing motivation.During the experiment,the experimental group was taught by using the multimodal writing teaching approach,while the control group was taught by using current English writing teaching.After the test,both classes participated in the post-test and post-questionnaire.The same questionnaire and a test were given out in those two classes,and 15 students of the experimental class were interviewed.The experimental data were collected and analyzed by SPSS 23.0.The results show that:(1)Multimodal teaching approach can improve students’English writing proficiency significantly;(2)Multimodal teaching approach can improve students’ English writing motivation,which is attributed to the expansion of the channels for language learning.(3)Besides the strengths,some problems were found in the application of this approach,of which the most noticeable one was that some underachievers’ attention was distracted by the use of different modalities.This should be taken into consideration when the teachers are preparing the class.In the end,the author discussed the limitations of this research and proposed some suggestions for further study in this field.