Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Classroom Discourse

With the development of science and technology, people’s way of communication has changed rapidly. The language-based communication in the past has gradually been replaced by the multimodal communication in which many modes co-construct the meanings simultaneously. Correspondingly, the traditional discourse analysis can no longer meet the demands of the new age, so a new perspective for discourse analysis—multimodal discourse analysis (MDA) emerges. Since the1990s, scholars at home and abroad have conducted researches over multimodal discourse analysis, forming three schools:social semiotic school, interactive sociological school and cognitive school. The social semiotic school which takes systemic functional linguistics (SFL) established by Halliday as the theoretical foundation is the main stream among these three schools. However, most of the current researches center on two-dimensional static discourse, such as film posters and magazine covers etc, and few on dynamic discourse.The classroom discourse is a typical type of dynamic multimodal discourse since it has the mode of language, the actional and visual modes. Although many scholars have analyzed classroom discourse from MDA perspective, few have studied all the modes in a class. Most of the researches center on the science disciplines, fewer on liberal arts disciplines, and even fewer on other liberal arts disciplines than the languages disciplines. In light of this background, this study makes an attempt to study all the modes of a class so as to find out how visual and auditory modalities interact to construct the three meanings by taking Justice, an open class of Harvard University as data, SFL and Visual Grammar as the theoretical foundation, and applying the synthetic theoretical framework of multimodal discourse analysis.In order to achieve the above-mentioned research objective, this thesis is aimed at answering the following questions:How do the semiotic resources distribute over the whole classroom teaching? What role do the different communicative modes play? How do the auditory and visual modalities interact with each other to construct the three meanings?This research takes both the quantitative and qualitative methods so as to remedy the deficiency of high subjectivity in the previous case studies of MDA. For the former, ELAN, a multimedia annotation tool, is used. For the latter, the functions of each mode are analyzed separately at first, and then the relationship between each mode and the language is studied.The major findings are as follows. Firstly, a four-stage schematic structure in the order of Introduction-Topic-Explanation-Conclusion is identified. Secondly, different modes express different meanings, including ideational meaning, interpersonal meaning and textual meaning. Thirdly, non-complementary relation gets the highest proportion in the synergies between the auditory modality and the visual modality of body action, and complementary relation accounts for the highest percentage in the synergies between the auditory modality and the visual modality of PPT.This research attempts to carry out a quantitative and qualitative analysis of all semiotic resources in Justice, having the theoretical and practical importance. Theoretically, it enriches the studies on the synergy of modalities in the classroom teaching. Practically, it provides some implications for domestic professors to better make use of multimodalities. But there are also limitations needed to be improved in future studies.