A Multimodal Approach To Powerpoint Courseware Attached To New Standard College English Book3and Book4

Along with the development of high technology and the renovation of teachingphilosophy, PowerPoint courseware has been widely used in foreign languageclassroom, which means its instructional value cannot be underestimated. For thisreason, foreign and domestic scholars have already carried out massive researches onthis object from the perspectives of technological application, principle andtechnique, and teaching application and so on. However, most of their conclusionsare based on their teaching experiences without too much scientific evidence, andonly a few of them adopted the newly-emerged perspective of multimodal discourseanalysis. Though multimodal discourse analysis is booming at home and abroad ingeneral, dozens of those researches on PPT courseware with this methodology onlyborrow this concept of multimodality rather than conduct in-depth analysis of it, letalone contriving a comprehensive and systematic multimodal framework for thisunique subject.Kress&van Leeuwen (1996,2006) propose the famous “Visual Grammar”, inwhich they point out that images, like language, can also realize the basic threemetafunctions, i.e., representation function, interactive function, and textual function.This theory can be widely applied to various multimodal discourses, such asadvertisements, posters, emblems as well as the PPT courseware. However, we findthat the theory ignores the interaction between different modes, especially betweenthe image and the text. Therefore, the thesis adds Martinec&Salway’s System forImage-text Relations to the aforementioned theory, with a purpose to construct amultimodal framework for PPT courseware. On the basis of the material from theslides attached to New Standard College English Books Three and Four, the thesisbegins with the multimodality of the slides, then focuses on exploring how the three“static” modes, namely, image, typography, color, realize their communicativemeaning independently or cooperatively, and what the relation between the image and the text is, so as to raise both the students’ and the teachers’ multiliteracy forbetter absorption and transmission of the knowledge in the PPT courseware.Consequently, the analysis not only testifies the applicability of the proposedframework, but also concludes with some features of the PowerPoint courseware aswell as some practical suggestions for the improvement of courseware making.Except for offering a new proposed multimodal framework for PPT coursewareand its demonstration, the author hopes that this study can also make a littlecontribution to the development of PPT analysis.