A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of College English Teachers In The Intensive Reading Class

With the rapid development of the informational age and the increasing tendency of cultural diversity,language varieties emerged continuously. Language study will not mainly show the traditionalcommunication or the language text any more, but it will study on the multimodal discourse includingimages, color, sound, dynamic images, diagrams and they mixed together. Network English teachinghappened conforming to the request of the informational age. It is a new teaching and learning method tomake use of the network resources and technology. This approach can effectively improve students’multiliteracies and their competence of using the language.Since American linguist Harris put forward a well-known theory of discourse analysis in the earlyfifties of the20thcentury, researchers around the world have made great efforts to develop several ofrelated theories and method (Zhu Yongsheng,2003).The multimodal discourse analysis emerged in the1990s, multimodal discourse analysis refers to the new forms of text in which words, typography, sound,picture and other semiotic resources are get together to make meaning.Teacher talk is not only a primary way of performing information to learner but also an importantmeans of controlling learners’ behavior. Since much of what teaching process of students. An objectiveanalysis of how teacher talk works in classroom discourse is critical for understanding the teaching process,to some extent; the teachers give insights to the learning process. So, teacher talk no longer only confinesitself to “talk” as the form of the language teaching, but also embraces modes like action and visual modes,namely, teacher talk is taking on a colorful multimodality. This is becoming a kind of fashionable trend indiscourse analysis.This study predominantly from the teacher professional development point of view, and intends to findout the variations of multimodal discourse between two types of teachers. i.e. the novice, and the expertteacher in the Intensive Reading Class, on the basis of theoretical foundations of Swain’s OutputHypothesis, Long’s Interaction Hypothesis, in terms of verbal modes and nonverbal modes. Verbal modesinvolve discourse quantity, questioning types, interactional modification features and feedback manners.Nonverbal modes also include gesture, posture, proxemics and facial expression. Through qualitativecomparative research on the different modes other than only language mode used in the teachers discourseof these two types of teachers, so the present study wants to find answers to the following questions:(1)what are the differences of the multimodal teacher discourse between the novice and expert teachers in terms of verbal discourse?(2) What are the differences of the multimodal teacher discourse between thenovice and expert teachers in terms of nonverbal discourse？All the statistic are taken from thetranscription of the video recording of four classes given by the four teachers. After transcriptions, somemajor finding as following:1The novice teachers’ talk time is more than expert teacher.2The expert teacher puts forward the number of referential questions, while the novice teachers raisethem less, but the novice teacher uses more display questions than expert teacher.3The novice teacher employ less confirmation checks than expert teacher, while the expert teacheruses more comprehension checks than the novice teacher, and the novice teachers employ more carinationchecks than expert teacher.4Compared with the expert teacher, the novice teachers employ the number of discourse feedbackthan the expert teacher.5In the aspect of employing the nonverbal modals, in a word, the novice teachers use more gesture,posture than expert teacher, master the proxemics more properately than the expert teacher, and have thecolorful expression than expert teacher.The present study investigates the teacher talk in college in the perspective of teacher professionaldevelopment, employing an empirical way. it’s expected that the present study shed some lights on thepedagogy and foreign language teacher education and development programs related to both pre-serviceand in-service teachers.