A Case Study Of Visual-verbal Relations And Application Principles In College English Classroom

With multiple communication channels and media being introduced into College English Curriculum, researchers, as well as education authorities, are seeking to explore relations of these multiple modes and figure out application principles in College English Classroom (CEC). Among these multiple modes, visual modes and verbal ones are comparatively more controversial in recent years.Mainly drawing on three theories as Halliday’s Social Semiotics (2001), Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual grammar (2006) and Zhang’s application principles for the choice of modes (2010,2012), this thesis takes the data from two files:(1) videos of two excellent CEC teachers; and (2) semi-structured interviews with them, within which it studies four modes in PPT or on blackboard presentation:image, words, dynamic and symbol. Three instruments-Multimodality annotation software ELAN, two-dimensional meaning-making tables and semi-structured interview are employed to facilitate both quantitative and qualitative analyses.The major findings are presented as follows:(1) On the PPT of cases, visual-verbal modes’synergy does not mean total simultaneity but means a certain overlap, with features of frequency, timing and proportion of each mode summarized by ELAN.(2) Proper collocation of image, words, dynamic and symbol, which relies on intersemiotic relations privileges two cases and is highly valued by these two excellent CEC teachers. The intersemiotic relations are revealed as complementary and non-complementary.(3) Zhang’s three principles of multiple modes in foreign language teaching are also applicable to visual-verbal modes under dynamic CEC context while there is a complementary one, principle of modes’transference, which acts as a reminder to transfer teacher-dominated modes’application to students’autonomy of modes.Practically, implication of this study can be borrowed by CEC teachers, especially novice ones, in detailed processes of design, selection and distribution of visual-verbal modes; methodologically, tools such as ELAN or two-dimensional tables can be used in student-oriented studies.