A Multimodal Analysis Of The Junior High School English Teaching

Discourse analysis has been greatly developed in its theory and practice since itappeared in the early1950s. The researcher has achieved a lot in this field from their initialwork on advertisements, literary texts, conversation, etc to their recent work on multimodaldiscourse. Classroom teaching, as an important tool for transmitting knowledge and culture,has attracted many scholars to devote themselves in this field. Wide application oftechnologies and communications has profound impact on education. In traditional Englishteaching in junior high schools, students are stimulated limitedly by verbal communication,while nowadays pictures, sound, color, teacher’ action, etc are integrated together with theverbal resources to give students deep impressions visually and audibly. And classroomteaching is shifted from being flat to being multimodal. The multimodal classroomdiscourse is becoming a fashionable trend in discourse analysis.Social semiotics and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) provide a theoreticalbasis for Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA). Classroom teaching is a kind of register,of which the three parameters are projected in teaching content, relations between teachersand learners and the interaction of different modalities. In the meaning construction,semiotic resources can simultaneously construct ideational meaning and enact socialrelations (i.e. interpersonal meaning), which are enabled through the organization of thediscourse, that is the textual meta-function. Meaning making is realized through theinteraction of semiotic resources. Halliday’s metafunctional principle serves as ananalyzing tool for MDA．In the thesis, the qualitative analysis method is adopted to analyze two typical Englishteaching contest discourses from the perspective of the chosen modalities and how they areinteracting with each other. Based on the analyses on various modes other than merelinguistic mode, the thesis is going to find out the following questions:Which design elements are selected to facilitate teachers to construct meaning ofclassroom teaching?How is the meaning represented through different modes and forms of semiosis?How do various semiotic modes cooperate together to construct meaning making of classroom teaching and develop students’meaning potential?What disadvantages do the two multimodal discourses have from the multimodalperspective?Through the investigation on the spatial mode, the actional, the visual, and the audiowhich appear in the two discourses, we can find that the nonverbal semiotic resources canfacilitate teachers to construct the meaning and develop students’ meaning potential evenin the language teaching classroom; Classroom teaching is never a monomodal action but amultimodal production. Each mode does not function independently but is integratedtogether to construct meaning by shift between foreground and background; The threedimensional target design is achieved by the rhetorically framed “discourse” in classroom;Multimodal texts and multimodal environments are the bridges which connect the socialculture, fashion, social activities with classroom teaching and are the resources used todevelop students’ multiliteracies.Teachers should integrate multimodal resources into classroom teaching in order todevelop students’ multiliteracies. Meanwhile, the teacher, as a mediator in classroom,should help students master the knowledge skillfully by rhetorically designing her/hisclass activities in the multimodal way. A new way of investigating classroom teaching isoffered by focusing on the various modes displayed in the two discourses. A multimodalanalysis may be helpful for teachers to think over their own practices in the effectivemeaning-making and reconsider their roles in the classroom teaching.