| Vocabulary plays a quite important role in English learning and, more precisely, it plays a cornerstone role. The amount of vocabulary directly affects students’ listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating abilities. And without enough vocabulary, students’ English learning in other aspects will be blocked.Multimodal discourse analysis theory has emerged since the 1990s in western countries, which is a new discourse analysis method based on systemic functional grammar (Kress and van Leeuwen 1996). This new discourse analysis theory broke through the limitations of discourse analysis on written or spoken discourse and expanded its research fields to image, animation, sound, color and other forms of meaning. On the basis of multimodal discourse analysis theory, New London Group came up with the theory of multimodal teaching.Because of the broad applicability of multimodal teaching, scholars at home and abroad actively explored the multimodal application in the field of teaching and have achieved remarkable results. However, most of these previous studies remain in the field of multimodal teaching theoretic aspects and there were few researches concerned about empirical studies on multimodal teaching of students’ vocabulary learning. In this thesis, combining the theory and empirical research, the author applied the multimodal teaching theory to Higher Vocational College student’s CET-4 low-frequency vocabulary teaching class in order to verify the effect of multimodal teaching on Higher Vocational student’s CET-4 low-frequency vocabulary acquisition.This research was done from September 2014 to January 2015. Firstly, collecting four classes (all was taught by the author) students’ College Entrance Examination scores and giving pre-test, the author got the data which reflected the four classes students’ original English background. With SPSS 19.0 statistical software, the author analyzed the collected data, selecting the two classes—Class 14 and Class 15 which have no distinct difference. According to the t-test, the score of Class 14 was a little better than that of Class 15 but the two classes’ deviation was not up to the obvious disparity (P>0.05) from the statistical perspective. Then, the author taught the two classes’ students CET-4 low-frequency words in their textbook differently for one semester. Class 15 as the experimental class took the multimodal teaching method and Class 14 as the control class took traditional way of teaching. In the end of the semester, the author gave the two classes the post-test whose content came from the six units in New Vocational English textbook. The author input the post-test score data into SPSS19.0 software to have a t-test. According to the t-test, the author found that the Mean of Class 15 was more than 4.13 than that of Class 14 and the two classes had obvious disparity (P<0.05). Based on the two classes’ Mean, Sig. and Std. Deviation, the author concluded that Class 15 students indeed did a good job in CET-4 low-frequency words acquisition compared to students in Class 14 and the feasibility of multimodal teaching method for Higher Vocational College student’s CET-4 low frequency vocabulary acquisition was testified. Lastly, through questionnaire survey, the author figured out that the majority of students supported multimodal teaching in their vocabulary studying.Through this thesis, the author expects this research could drive reforms for English teacher’s vocabulary teaching mode in Higher Vocational College and promote Higher Vocational English teaching to a new stage. |
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