On Multimodal Discourse Analysis And Enlish Writing Teaching

As one of the four basic language skills for communication, English writing plays animportant role in students’ comprehensive ability. Students are required to use varioustechniques in English writing. Therefore, the issue of how to improve the students’ writingcompetence has aroused teachers’ increasing attention. One’s communication manner hasbecome multimodal with the rapid development of information technology. According to theNew Curriculum Reform, the presentation of teaching content, the students’ learning methodsand teachers’ teaching models are demanded to change, which is in line with the multimodalcommunication. Multimodal resources draw students’ more interests than those ofmonomodality, so it is significant to apply multimodal discourses analysis to the writingteaching of senior English.Based on relative research findings of multimodal discourses and English writing athome and abroad, and the theories of Halliday’s metafunctions as well as Kress and vanLeeuwen’s Visual Grammar, this thesis proposes the hypothesis that students’ writing abilitycan be improved by using visual and verbal modes in English writing teaching. In order totest the hypothesis, an empirical research was carried out among students of Senior Two inZhangZhou No.3Middle School. The experiment lasted for one term, and questionnaire, theobservation of students’ classroom behaviors and informal interview were put into practice.After the experiment, the data are analyzed by SPSS17.0, which shows that students’enthusiasm for writing can be motivated by applying multimodal resources to classroomteaching, and the hypothesis are certified that students’ English writing competence，such asthe abilities of examining topic ideas and selecting materials，can be improved with the helpof multimodal resources, that is, charts and images. It is hoped that the application of visualresources to writing teaching makes students’ writing easier and thus transfers Englishwriting to an interesting and visual activity.