An Applied Study On Multimodal Discourse Analysis

With the continuous development and renovation of science and technology, images, sound, animation, diagrams, colors and layout, especially the modern multimedia, are used to deliver the information by means of the form of multimodal discourse in the modern society. With the rise and development of multimodal discourse analysis, multimodality is also applied in language teaching. Multimodal English teaching meets the need of worldwide cultural diversity and communicative multimodal development and requirements of deepening the reform of English teaching and improving the standard of English teaching. So far, the study on the multimodal discourse analysis on oral English teaching is still at the initial stage. This thesis chooses oral English teaching as the object of study. From the perspective of social semiotics, derived from Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics, the application of multimodal discourse analysis to pedagogies will be discussed through the quantitative and qualitative methods in this thesis. Also the feasibility and effectiveness of multimodal oral English teaching will be analyzed in this thesis. O’Halloran, Baldry, Halliday, Hasan, Kress, Van Leeuwen, Hu Zhuangli, Zhu Yongsheng, and Zhang Delu studied this issue before. Based on their achievements, the thesis attempts to provide an integrative framework on a multimodal discourse analysis of oral English teaching. The thesis attempts to study the "meta-functions" of different modalities and analyze the application and its results of different modalities and multimedia in oral English classroom. Finally in different kinds of contexts of situation, the proper use of different modalities which signify different meaning potentials can achieve different teaching aims and help students develop their English thinking.The thesis aims to discuss how to adopt the most effective modality and the media teaching activities in oral business English teaching. At the theoretical level, this study not only expands the aspects of multimodal discourse analysis and testifies the operability and effectiveness of multimodal discourse analysis on pedagogies in the oral business English classroom, but also provides people with an important academic and practical significance in improving students’abilities of internalizing the information effectively, boost vocational students’English practical capacities and develop English logical skills.