Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of EFL Teachers In Excellent Reading Class Of Primary School

Advances in modern science and technology bring about changes to the ways of people’s communication.Beyond verbal language,people also communicate through various non-verbal semiotic resources,such as gesture,gaze,posture,sound,text,image,diagram,and so on.Multimodal discourse has been produced in communication when an orchestrated use of different semiotic modes simultaneously activates auditory,visual,tactile,and other senses.Traditional discourse analysis that focuses on the linguistic aspect may not be able to give an adequate account of multimodal discourse.With its emergence in the 1990 s,multimodal discourse analysis provides a new perspective to probe into the integration of multiple semiotic resources.As multimedia and digital educational resources are available in classrooms,teachers deploy more and more semiotic resources to express meanings and optimize teaching effects.An increasing number of scholars have turned a multimodal lens on teachers’ use of modal resources,mainly concentrating on science classroom in secondary school.Some studies have explored English as a Foreign Language(EFL)in the college classroom,yet little attention has been paid to EFL classroom in primary school.Considering the research gap,this study attempts to describe and analyze teachers’ use of semiotic resources in EFL class of primary school based on Systemic Functional Grammar,Visual Grammar,and Zhang’s Synthetic Theoretical Framework for Multimodal Discourse Analysis.Ten teachers’ excellent English reading classes are selected as representative cases.This study investigates the number and the distribution of different semiotic modes used by teachers,and analyzes functions of semiotic modes and how they interact to construct meanings.Class videos of 450 minutes are manually annotated and transcribed in a multimedia annotation software named ELAN to collect data of semiotic modes.The theoretical frameworks involved in this study lay foundations for the qualitative analysis of meaning construction by a synergy of modes.Three major findings have been revealed through detailed observation and analysis.First,all the ten teachers employ a multimodal ensemble of semiotic resources,including auditory modality,visual modality,and body modality to convey meanings in excellent EFL classes of primary school.Semiotic modes are distributed differently over a class.Among five teaching procedures of a class(namely the beginning of the class,pre-reading,while-reading,post-reading,and assignment),while-reading procedure involves diverse semiotic modes and has the most abundant modes,accounting for 51.2% of modal resources in the whole class,followed by post-reading(29.3%)and pre-reading(17.3%).Procedures of the beginning of the class and assignment have fewer modal resources.Secondly,among ten semiotic modes,spoken language is the most widely used mode(23.2%)by teachers,followed by gaze(18.6%),text & image(15.3%),facial expression(14.1%),and gesture(13.3%).Audio,real object,text,video,image,these five modes are used relatively less.Different semiotic modes play different roles in teachers’ discourse.Body modality reinforces verbal messages.56.6% of gestures attract students’ attention and direct them to specific places.39.1% of gestures explain concrete or abstract contents through embodied imitations.64.1% of teachers’ gaze demands information from students,while teachers offer information by gazing at the screen or blackboard.As the central visual resource,text & image(55.3%)presents vivid and lifelike depictions of stories and visualize key information with pictorial illustrations.Thirdly,teachers construct ideational,interpersonal and textual meanings through a complex interplay of multimodal resources in classes.Ideational meaning is constructed mainly by spoken language.Visual modality and body modality assist spoken language to realize ideational meaning.Narrative meanings in text & image complement or highlight meanings in spoken language.Iconic and metaphoric gestures explain and reinforce verbal meanings.Body modality of gaze,proxemics,facial expression,and gesture,play significant roles in coordinating with spoken language to express interpersonal meaning.Teachers’ textual meaning is conveyed through three compositional features of visual resources including framing,information value and salience,as well as through spoken language’s information structure and cohesive devices.Verbal and visual information can be connected by the directive function of deictic gesture and gaze.This study attempts to shed light on teachers’ orchestration of semiotic resources in excellent English reading classes of primary school.It contributes to theories of multimodal discourse analysis in classroom studies.Moreover,it provides pedagogical implications for EFL teachers in primary school to combine various modal resources for designing multimodal teaching and cultivating students’ multiliteracies in class.