A Study Of The Multimodalities Of College English Integrated Classroom Teaching In Different Contexts

The rapid IT development enriches the traditional way of communication andalso changes the language teaching approaches and philosophies in distinctive ways.The previous studies of language teaching are mainly from the perspectives of teachingmethod, teaching design and learning style, but there exists few studies on themodality choice in the construction of meaning-making in the teaching discourse. Sothis thesis attempts to make a comparative study of the features, merits and demerits ofmodality choice in the contest and authentic teaching contexts based on MultimodalDiscourse Analysis and Visual Grammar by studying the following questions:(1) Whatdifferences are there in the employment of modalities and semiotic resources in collegeEnglish integrated classroom teaching in contest and authentic contexts?(2) What arethe features, merits and demerits of the employment of modalities and semioticresources in five teaching phases in both contest and authentic contexts?(3) Whatpossible reasons lead to the different modality choices in college English integratedclassroom teaching?In this paper, a proposed theoretical framework for dynamic teaching discoursebased on Zhang Delu’s (2009a) Synthetic Theoretical Framework of MDA and Kress&van Leeuwen’s (1996) Visual Grammar is taken as theoretical framework; the authorinvestigates the choice of modality and semiotic resources in different teaching phasesof two college English integrated classroom teaching videos in contest context andanother two in authentic context with Excel and gets the following findings:Firstly, college English integrated classroom teaching discourse, as a dynamicmultimodal discourse, can be investigated from the multimodal discourse analysisperspective. Meanwhile, the tentative framework proposed in this paper is applicableto the comparative analysis of the choice of modality and semiotic resources in collegeEnglish integrated classroom teaching in different contexts.Secondly, it is found that visual and audio modality are the two dominatingmodalities in college English integrated classroom teaching in contest and authenticcontexts, with tactile modality employed in very small amount in certain teachingphase, and there exist slight differences in the proportion of three modalities in fiveteaching phases. As for the use of semiotic resources in two contexts, all four teachers has employed such visual semiotic resources as hand gesture, facial expression,movement and PPT, such audio semiotic resources as stress, tempo and change of tonein their teaching. Tactile semiotic resource can only be found in certain teaching phasein forms of class activity. The employment of semiotic resources in contest context ismore effective and scientific, which has contributed greatly to the optimization ofteaching effect. While a great amount of the employment of semiotic resources inauthentic context has caused confusion and distraction to some extent. None of thecases in two contexts can be viewed as a perfect example of multimodal teachingdiscourse.Thirdly, the demand of multiliteracies, the consideration of students’ learningstyle, the synergy of visual, audio and tactile modality and rich available semioticresources in the classroom account for the employment of multimodalities in thecollege English integrated classroom teaching.Based on the findings above, the paper provides some pedagogical suggestionsfor both college English teachers and school administrators. As for teachers, they aresupposed to have deep insight into the principles for integrating modalities andmultiple roles in multimodal classroom. As for school administrators, they areexpected to offer support in form of teaching facilities, teaching training andcorresponding assessment. And meanwhile, they are expected to offer emotionalsupport and encouragement to the attempt made by the teachers in the use of modalityand semiotic resources.Finally, this paper points out its limitations. The data collected for the research isfar from enough; the indexes of modality and semiotic resources for comparativeanalysis in this study are a bit subjective to some extent. More scientific and completeindexes of more data should be desired for future research based on a more practicaland workable theoretical framework.