Multimodal Analysis Of Teacher Talk

Teacher talk is not only a primary way of transmitting information to learner but also an important means of controlling learners'behavior. Since much of what teaching process involves is teacher talk and teacher talk in classroom will greatly affect the learning process of students, an objective analysis of how teacher talk works in classroom discourse is critical for understanding the teaching process, the teachers themselves and, to some extent, gives insights to the learning process. Aware of the important role of teacher talk playing in the teaching and learning process, researchers at home and abroad have achieved a lot in studying teacher talk in the aspects like amount of teacher talk, teacher's questions, response time for learners'answers, feedback on learners'performance, teacher speech repairing and modifications. All the studies focused on the verbal form of teacher talk. While words and verbalisms may be the preferred symbols of classroom instruction, they do not represent the only means of instructing. Nonverbal behavior and clues like gesture, gaze, facial expressions, postures, proxemics etc.. represent elegant signs for conveying and receiving information.With the leap of information technology and spread of computer science, multi-media find their broad way in language teaching. PowerPoint courseware has become an often used medium in instruction because of its representation of both visual and audio resources. Therefore, teacher talk no longer confines itself to"talk"in the form of language, but also embraces modes like acitonal and visual ones. That is to say, teacher talk is taking on a landscape of multimodality, which is becoming a fashionable trend in discourse analysis.In light of this, this thesis carries out a case study on a multimodal analysis of the teaching video of three prize winners in an English teaching competition. Through qualitative research on the various modes other than mere linguistic mode used in the teacher talk of these three teachers, this thesis aims to find answers to the following questions: (1) Apart from speech, what kind of non-verbal resources can be used in class to facilitate classroom interaction? (2) How do various modes cooperate to make teacher talk more effective? (3) How does multimodal teacher talk extend classroom interaction through the realization of ideational, interpersonal and textual function?Through the investigation of the actional and visual modes as well as linguistic mode displayed in the prize-winner teachers, it can be found that even in the language– dominant classroom, teachers consciously or unconsciously use different modes other than linguistic mode to facilitate classroom interaction. Teacher talk is by no means a monomodal action but a multimodal production. Each mode doesn't function separately but cooperate to articulate meanings through grounding. The shapes of knowledge and classroom interaction are realized by rhetorically framing teacher talk multimodally. As a mediator in classroom, the teacher should facilitate students'shapes of knowledge by rhetorical framing his or her talk.Drawing attention to the various modes displayed in teacher talk provides a new way of investigating communicative work which teachers and students are engaged in. A multimodal analysis may be helpful for teachers to consider their own practice in the effective production of curriculum knowledge and to shed some lights on rethinking the teacher's role in class, by offering insights into the ways in which they already use multimodal communication to convey meanings, and the ways in which they might consciously make use of it in the future.