An Empirical Study On Multimodal Teaching Of English Reading In Senior High School

Reading comprehension is an important criterion for evaluating students’ English competence, and cultivating students’ reading comprehension is an important purpose of English teaching. There are many limitations in the traditional English reading teaching model. The phenomenon of time consuming and low efficiency in reading teaching is still prominent. While the western researchers have begun to put language symbols and non linguistic symbols(such as action, posture, facial expression, laboratory, teaching equipment, and other symbolic system) in the framework of discourse analysis, forming a new discourse analysis method that is multimodal discourse analysis. At home and abroad, the research of multimodal discourse analysis developed rapidly and it has been applied into education. Based on this, a new teaching method was born, which is Multimodal Teaching. Besides, the new curriculum reform in middle school is urgent. Serious problems still remain and need to be dealt with. With the backgrounds above, language teaching not only means teaching language, but also means cultivating students’ comprehensive ability of reading and writing. The significant feature of Multimodal Teaching is the multi modes resources that teachers use in class. Different modes can stimulate students’ different sense organs. And the researcher supposes that different senses organs working together may make English reading teaching more effective. So this study learned from the theory of multimodal discourse analysis, based on classroom teaching and tried to discuss three questions:Firstly, can multimodal teaching improve students’ motivation to learn English reading?Secondly, is multimodal teaching a more effective way to promote students’ long-term memory of reading passages that they have read in class?Thirdly, can multimodal teaching improve students’ reading achievements?The research subjects are 100 students who come from two parallel classes of Grade 2 in No.1 senior high school of Tai’an in Anshan. The time devoted to the experiment is 16 weeks from Sept. 2015 to Dec. 2015. The control class is exposed to the traditional teaching method while the Multimodal Teaching approach is conducted in experimental class. The collected data of the questionnaires and tests are analyzed by SPSS 17.0. An interview is conducted to get more information on students’ reading motivation and Multimodal Teaching in the experimental class at the end of the experiment.The researcher draws the conclusion that the application of Multimodal Teaching to English reading in senior high school is both feasible and beneficial. Under the application of Multimodal Teaching,students’ learning motivation can be enhanced. The reading abilities and long-term memory have improved greatly. Furthermore, Multimodal Teaching is only a tentative approach to English reading teaching, limitations are inevitable and more efforts and investigations are needed for further research.