The Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Teacher Talk In Senior High School High-Quality English Reading Classes

With the rapid development of information technology,people’s communication methods are no longer limited to “pure language”,but involve a variety of modal resources such as image,sound,video,gesture,movement and other semiotic means.Therefore,multimodel discourse analysis theory came into being,which has been widely used in classroom discourse studies.Based on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics,Kress and van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar and Zhang Delu’s Synthetic Theoretical Framework for MDA,this thesis analyze six reading teaching videos of six first-prize winners from The 11 th National English Demonstration Class in Senior High School with the following three research questions:1)What are the features of high-quality English reading classes? 2)In high-quality English reading classes of Senior High School,what are the features of the multimodal discourse in different teaching stages and what are the functions of different modalities? 3)In high-quality English reading classes of Senior High School,how do different modalities interact with each other to construct representational,interactive and compositional meanings?Both quantitative and qualitative are adopted.With the help of ELAN 6.0,detailed annotation and six high-quality English reading classes are conducted and the results are as follows:First of all,the structure of the reading classes can be divided into seven stages: They are [CB]-[LI]-[PRR]-[WR]-[PR]-[AS]-[FI].CB stands for Class Beginning;LI stands for Lead-in part;PRR stands for Pre-reading part;WR stands for While-reading part;PR stands for Post-reading part;AS stands for Assignments and FI stands for Finish.In addition,senior high school English reading classes have multimodal features,which make advantage of a number of modal resources such as language,images,videos,gestures,gazes and so on.Second,from the usage of modal resources in six demonstration classes,a variety of modal resources such as verbal modal resources,visual modal resources,and bodily modal resources are widely used.It can be seen from the ELAN annotation results that the frequency and density of phase modal resources are different in each teaching stage.Verbal language including intonation,stress and pause;bodily mode such as gaze and gesture;and proxemics run through the whole teaching process.There are few symbolic resources at the beginning and the end of the class.From the PPR part,the mode kinds begin to increase.The WR and PR parts are the two most abundant periods,which contain the teachers’ pure language,gesture,gaze,and visual text&image are highly combined to construct meaning.Third,in the process of senior high school English reading classes,teachers construct representational,interactive and compositional meanings through collocation and interaction with multiple modes.Studies have shown that teachers construct representational meaning through the narrative process which contains embedded videos and image& text.The construction of interactive meaning involves three dimensions: distance,eye contact and attitude in which teachers apply proxemics and gaze,accompanied by intonation and postures,etc.The compositional meaning including information values,salience and framing,is realized by the use of PPT.Based on the above findings,this paper proposes the following suggestions for senior high school English reading classes: 1.Teachers should be aware of the multimode features of English reading classes and learn to use relevant modes to improve teaching effectiveness and scientifically.2.Teachers need to understand how to make full use of various modal resources to realize the representational,interactive and compositional meaning during the teaching process.3.Teachers should pay attention to the essential role of multimodal discourse theory in English teaching and analyze multimodal discourse theory in daily education.