The Effects Of Multimodal Teaching On Senior High School Students’ English Vocabulary Learning

English vocabulary plays a crucial role in English learning.Wilkins(1972: 111)once pointed out,“Without grammar,very little can be conveyed;without vocabulary,nothing can be conveyed”.However,vocabulary teaching has always been a challenge for teachers.The problems of low efficiency in vocabulary teaching and poor performance of students are still relatively conspicuous.Since the end of the last century,multimodal discourse analysis has been applied to the field of foreign language education by many scholars.Scholars at home and abroad believe that multimodal teaching can arouse students’ interest in learning and improve their academic performance.This study combines multimodal teaching with vocabulary teaching to explore the effects of multimodal teaching on senior high school students’ English vocabulary learning through the following three questions:(1)What is the effect of multimodal teaching on senior high school students’ breadth of vocabulary knowledge?(2)What is the effect of multimodal teaching on senior high school students’ depth of vocabulary knowledge?(3)What attitudes do students hold towards multimodal teaching?Based on multimodal discourse analysis theory,a four-month teaching experiment is conducted among the second-grade students of a senior high school in Lanzhou City,Gansu Province.Before the teaching experiment,researcher tests the students’ breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge in the experimental class and the control class respectively,so as to analyze whether students’ breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge of the two classes have significant differences.During the experiment,researcher adopts the traditional vocabulary teaching in the control class and the multimodal vocabulary teaching in the experimental class.After the experiment,post-tests are conducted in the two classes to test students’ vocabulary knowledge breadth and vocabulary knowledge depth respectively,and a questionnaire is distributed to students in the experimental class to explore their attitudes towards multimodal vocabulary teaching.All the data obtained from the tests and the questionnaire are analyzed by SPSS 24.0.The research results reveal that:(1)multimodal teaching can improve senior high school students’ breadth of vocabulary knowledge;(2)multimodal teaching can improve senior high school students’ depth of vocabulary knowledge;(3)the students in the experimental class hold positive attitudes towards multimodal teaching.However,because of limited sample size and research time,there are a lot of shortcomings need to be improved in the future.The researcher hopes that this study is able to offer a valuable reference for vocabulary teaching in senior high school.