The Application Of Multimodal Teaching Approach To English Reading Teaching At Middle School

Reading is an important way of language acquisition. Reading comprehension is an important indicator to measure English proficiency. One of the aims of English teaching is to improve students’ reading ability. However, there are many limitations of the traditional English reading teaching mode. The boring classroom atmosphere and the monntonous teaching design lower students’ interest in English reading, weaken students’ comprehension ability and make students’ grades not very good.In 1990 s, Western scholars proposed multimodal discourse analysis theory. They believe that other semiotic resources(sound, images, video, animation, motion, color, facial expressions, etc.) and means can be used to communicate. In the past twenty years, many experts and scholars did many researches in this field. However, much emphasis has been put on theoretical discussions and less work has been done on empirical research. In order to make up the deficiency of empirical research, this study employs the method of combination of theory and practice to explore mutimodal reading teaching mode. To verify the effects of mutimodal reading teaching on enhancing students’ English reading scores and reading interest, the author carried out some teaching experiments.The study lasted for three months, the subjects consist of 80 students from Class 1 Grade 8 and Class 2 Grade 8. Different teaching modes are implemented. Multi-modal reading teaching mode is applied in Class 1 Grade 8 which is the experimental class. Traditional reading teaching mode is applied in Class 2 Grade 8 which is the control class. Reading tests were carried out in the two classes before and after the teaching experiment. Two interviews and a questionnaire survey has been done to know whether the students’ interest of English reading changed. All the data from the reading tests and questionnaire survey analyzed by statistical software SPSS19.0.In the research, the author has drawn the conclusion that the application of multimodal teaching approac to English reading teaching in middle school can improve students’ reading grades and their interest in English reading.