An Empirical Study Of Grammar Teaching Under Multimodal Discourse Analysis In The Junior Middle School

Grammar plays a crucial role in English teaching, and you can’t avoid it no matter whether you’ll teach or learn English. As Wilkins D A.(1973) points out in Linguistics in Language Teaching, without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed. However, nowadays middle school students show little interest in grammar learning so their studying effects have been given a direct impact. Though they spend a lot of extra hours learning grammar, they gain little from it. The situation proves that a traditional grammar teaching might not well meet students’demands.With the development of modern educational technology, multimodal discourse analysis under systematic functional linguistics has emerged. In 1996, New London Group advanced a new concept-multimodal teaching, in which the multimodal theory was applied into the language teaching. The group managed to take advantage of multimedia, pictures, graphs, music, group discussion, role play and other channels to mobilize learners’senses and stimulate their learning interest so as to let them actively participate in the dynamic process of language learning. As a modern teaching method, multimodal teaching can help students learn easily and efficiently.Based on the theory of multimodal discourse and the previous researches, this paper discusses and researches on the following two questions:1) Is MDA grammar teaching better than traditional grammar teaching in middle school? If yes, what’s the advantage of MDA grammar teaching?2) Does MDA grammar teaching help students to build their interest in grammar? If yes, how does MDA grammar teaching increase students’ interest in grammar?In this study, multimodal teaching mode and traditional grammar teaching are employed respectively in the two parallel classes of second-grade of Xinning Middle School in Guangdong Province to compare the different results with an empirical research. The author chooses one lesson as a case study to explain the teaching procedure in details by multimodal grammar teaching. This research mainly adopts teaching experiment and questionnaire as the approaches, and analyzes the research data by applying Factor Analysis, Nonparametric T-Test, the Paired-Samples T-Test and Reliability Analysis to two grammar tests and questionnaires. The research result shows that multimodal grammar teaching is far more superior to traditional teaching and self-evident in improving students’interest in grammar learning as well as their scores and pragmatic ability in grammar.