An Analysis On Foregrounding In Multimodal Teacher Talk

Teacher Talk (TT) is very important to the language teachers, which is used in every kind of classroom teaching activities, such as educating knowledge, arranging classroom activities, communicating with students, asking questions and so on. TT is considered as a means for executing teaching plans as well as giving input for language learners. It has been proved by many researchers that TT plays an important and undeniable role in classroom teaching. Studies on teacher talk are of great significance to the teachers and classroom teaching and learning.Since modern technologies of multiple mediums are widely used in classroom teaching, it greatly changed the presenting forms of teacher talk. Teacher talk is no longer appearing as a single mode of language forms in classroom teaching, it contains auditive modality, visual modality and actional modality, what is called multimodal teacher talk. In the real classroom teaching, there are multiple modes, which are working in line with each others. In order to achieve the teaching goal, to attract the students’attention, to strengthen student’s memories and motivate students’participation, teacher may use a certain mode as a main mode. That means teachers are making prominent on purpose by putting the other modes in the position of background. That is a typical foregrounding in multimodal TT. The thesis will focus on the foregrounding features of multimodal TT. In this thesis, the main aim is foregrounding in multimodal TT and the functions of foregrounded multimodal TT in the real classroom situation, hopefully it may make some useful reference in teaching design.Based on the research aim, the main research subject is collected from real classroom teaching. Qualitative research method is adopted in this research. The foregrounding theory will be used to classify and analyze the foregrounding forms existing in the30class hours’ multimodal TT sample. According to the classification of foregrounding, the transcript of the auditory modality of TT will be analyzed the foregrounding features in linguistic way, and the visual modality of TT will be analyzed from foregrounding in visual art. About what is the function of foregrounding in multimodal TT, descriptive analysis is conducted with questionnaire, classroom observation and interview; it should be a comprehensive analysis on teacher’s awareness and students’response of foregrounded TT. According to the interview, classroom observation and questionnaire, by analyzing students’ response and teachers’ awareness, the author found that the function of foregrounding in multimodal TT is:1) to attract student’s attention;2) to help students in understanding and memorizing knowledge,3) to motivate students’ learning interest.