A Dynamic Multi-Semiotic Discourse Analysis Of CCTV Lecture Room

With the rapid advancement of computer science and multimedia technology, the role of non-verbal semiotic resources, such as colors, music, gestures, images in daily communication and dissemination of information becomes more and more notable. The shift of research orientation from discourse analysis confined within language to multi-semiotic analysis becomes necessary. Under these circumstances, Multimodal Discourse Analysis (hereafter MDA) based on Systemic Functional Linguistics, emerged to meet such needs and soon became the research focus. Up to now, many researchers have conducted profound studies on multimodal discourse, most of which mainly focus on single semiotic resource, like language, images, and confine within two dimensional or static, image-verbal discourse. Little attention is paid to the analysis of three-dimensional dynamic discourse, which involves multiple modes of communication and complex process of meaning construction.As a classic lecture program in CCTV, Lecture Room is very popular among the general audiences and has attracted extensive attention in recent years. Since it includes various semiotic resources, the decoding of this program requires certain level of multiliteracy on the viewers. Previous studies on Lecture Room seldom touch upon the perspective of MDA. In light of this background, this thesis attempts to decode how different semiotic resources, visual and textual, interact with one another to construct meaning in Lecture Room under the theoretical framework of MDA theories and the register theory. The present study reformulates Janet Jones’ two-stage MDA framework, in which a preliminary quantitative Multimodal Content Analysis is followed by an interpretative qualitative MDA. We seek to find out the deep impetus of the employment of multiple semiotic resources and some possible implications on teaching and other fields.The empirical study of Lecture Room shows a great variety of semiotic resources are used, among which the most frequent ones are embedded videos and caption in the bottom. Accordingly, the technology of videograhpy is most frequently employed to create visual semiotics. However, the distribution of these resources in different parts of the schematic structure shows great variations. To be specific, semiotic resources in the beginning (Trailerl and Title) and ending parts (Trailer3) of each episode are more interpersonally-oriented whereas the middle parts are more experientially-oriented. Besides, the major space of the screen is allocated to visual rather than verbal blocks. The screen designer of Lecture Room tends to use a sans serif font in a standard size (size3) for the majority of text blocks, all of which add to the creation of overall meanings.The findings of this research may give us the following practical inspirations:firstly, as an important way of teaching, Lecture Room bears some resemblance to classroom teaching. Due to their remarkable similarity, the analysis of popular episodes of Lecture Room can give some implications to teachers, i.e. how to coordinate the choice and distribution of multiple semiotic resources, thus achieve the best effect of classroom teaching. Secondly, this research explains from the linguistic perspective the reason why Lecture Room enjoys such a wide popularity, which may shed new light on program production. Thirdly, for language learners and TV audiences, it may help to develop their multiliteracies. In actual language communication activities (campaign speech, advertising, sales promotion, etc.), this communicative model of dynamic discourse may give some practical implications to language learners on how to use multiple semiotic resources to achieve successful communication.