The Application Of Multimodal Teaching To English Vocabulary In Junior Middle School

Vocabulary is the foundation of acquiring a language. Vocabulary teaching is an indispensable part in language teaching. The increasingly high demands of teaching reform to vocabulary present new challenges to vocabulary teaching in junior middle school. The conventional vocabulary teaching mode which is adopted by most teachers can not meet the high demands of the reform. A new teaching mode to keep up with the pace of the times is an urgent need for vocabulary teaching.With the information and communication technology is marching on, teaching methods are constantly changing. In the 1990 s, multimodal discourse analysis is prevailing in western countries. Linguists have made extensive use of the theory in the field of language teaching, and developed a multimodal teaching mode, and set up a complete theoretical analysis system and practical research system. In the early 21 Century, multimodal discourse analysis is introduced to our country. Many domestic scholars have done some correlational researches. But most of them focused on theory, and empirical research is less. This study attempts to combine the theoretical basis and practical research, apply the multimodal teaching mode in vocabulary teaching, and test the students’ learning effect through the teaching experiment.This study lasts for one semester. The research subjects are 98 students from two parallel classes of grade seven in No.3 middle school of Gaoping City, as well as some English teachers of grade seven. The purpose of the study is to know the attitudes of teachers and students to multimodal vocabulary teaching, and to test the effects of students’ vocabulary acquisition in multimodal vocabulary teaching. The author carries on the multimodal vocabulary teaching in the experimental class, and the conventional vocabulary teaching in the controlled class. The author carries out the empirical research as these steps: pre-test, mid-test, questionnaire, interview, post-test, data processing, analysis and discussion of the results and brings forth several conclusions. Firstly, in multimodal teaching, the effect of students’ vocabulary acquisition is better. And it has a significant improvement in the memory and the use of the vocabulary. Secondly, students and English teachers hold a positive attitude towards multimodal vocabulary teaching, and think that this mode has some obvious advantages compared with the conventional vocabulary teaching. The advantages are as followings: Multimodal PPT can attract students’ attention, deepen their impression of vocabulary, and reduce their memory burden. In a relaxed atmosphere, students are more willing to answer the teacher’s questions. The abundant information can enrich student’s knowledge and enlarge their vocabulary.The research of multimodal teaching is still in the primary stage in our country. This study has some implications for further related researches and English vocabulary teaching in junior middle school.