A Case Study Of Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of High School English Reading Teacher

With the emergence of the new communication methods and information transmission channels brought by the advancements of science and technology,multi-modal discourse communication has emerged.And there is no exception with English language teaching.Teachers can make full use of multiple resources and modes in their daily teaching.As multi-modal discourse analysis theories develop and gradually get to be associated with foreign language teaching,multi-modal discourse analysis of teacher’s discourse has become an inevitable trend in the field of classroom discourse research.However,in practice,although teachers are aware of using multi-modal discourse to organize their teaching,some problems unavoidably appear,such as excessive use of native language,overuse of audio and video,poor design of PPT and so on.Therefore,it is worthwhile to do in-depth research on teacher’s classroom multi-modal discourse,which can enhance teachers’ perception on semantic construction of modes and improve their skills to apply them in teaching.At present,most of the studies pertaining to multi-modal classroom discourse focus on those at university or junior high school and their corpora are usually quality lessons in the form of competitions.Besides,the researchers always select successful examples of multiple modes from different teachers,which are unable to reflect the real effects of multi-modal classroom discourse in a single real teaching context.Therefore,based on visual grammar proposed by Kress and van Leeuwen,and framed in the comprehensive framework for multi-modal discourse analysis constructed by Zhang Delu,the present study takes a recording of an English reading class by a high school English teacher in a county in Ningxia as its corpus,and conducted a case study on teacher’s multi-modal classroom discourse.It first focuses on the overall distribution of the teacher’s multi-modal discourse.Then it moves to the characteristics of various modes at each teaching stage.Finally,it concentrates on some typical interactive moments in the teaching process and analyses how various mode groups work to express representational,interactive and compositional meanings so as to collaboratively facilitate the organization and implementation of the reading instruction.Based on the above analyses,the present study draws the following conclusion.Firstly,the corpus is abundant with modes which include pure linguistic modes(teacher’s oral language,covering target language and native language)and para-linguistic modes(intonation,repetition)as well as body modes(gaze,social distance,gestures)and non-body modes(PPT).And with pure language as the major mode,collaborated by others,all these modes are helpful to organize the teaching activities and target to the teaching objectives.Secondly,in terms of the distribution of modes in the different stages,the total duration of mode annotation in While-reading is the longest,followed by Pre-reading,Post-reading and Warm-up,and Summary is the shortest,which is in the shape of an inverted U with the middle parts high while two ends low.Taking all the factors such as activity design and etc.into consideration,modes at each stage are used reasonably.Finally,as far as the semantic level is concerned,the Representational Meaning in the corpus is mainly realized by narrative representation,in which gestures and gaze are the Vectors,connecting the Actor(the teacher)and the Goal(either the students or PPT).The Interactive Meaning is realized by such factors as Contact,Social Distance and Perspective between the teacher and the students.The Compositional Meaning comprises the images involved both the teacher and PPT,and the slides.In the former one,the new information flows either from the teacher or the PPT as the change of Social Distance between them.Slides of PPT are well-structured with clear difficult and key points.Meanwhile,the three meta-functions blend with each other to promote the teaching process orderly and smoothly.In addition,based on the in-depth analysis of teacher’s classroom multi-modal discourse in the corpus,this study also sheds some light on how to use various modes to organize English reading lesson,as well as on the construction of teaching facilities by the relative departments.Firstly,teachers should carefully select and design modes as well as use them reasonably in teaching based on the considerations at both the macro and micro levels.In addition,teachers should learn about the functions and effects of modes so as to use them effectively,appropriately and economically to organize the teaching process.Finally,other departments should improve the teaching conditions and environment in order to better serve the teaching.