A Research On Cultivation Of Multiliteracies In College English Reading Class

The rapid development of modern information technology and close ties of global communications strengthen increasingly the feature of the diversity of culture.The ways of receiving information are becoming more and more various,so that modern discourse does no longer take the language as the only way to express and transmit information.The construction and communication of meaning in communicative activities depend more on the integration of visual social symbolic,auditory social symbolic resources and tactile social symbolic resources,which present the tendency of multimodalities.The traditional language literacy cannot meet the needs of reading multimodal discourse;therefore,the necessity and importance of cultivating of the multilitercies has been shown obviously.In recent years,scholars at home and abroad have begun to pay attention to the students' multiliteracies and have conducted a lot of researches.Fruitful results have been achieved;however,there are still some limitations and deficiencies.Most of the researches remains at the theoretical level or concentrates on the constructions of the multimodal teaching framework.The discussion on how to help students develop multiliteracies in College English reading teaching has less been mentioned.Thus this experiment focuses on the following three issues:(1)What are students' perceptions about multiliteracies and multimodal PPT presentations?(2)Do multimodal PPT presentations teaching methods have any influence on students' reading ability?(3)Are there any differences in students' multiliteracies between the experimental group(EG)and the control group(CG)?In order to solve the above problems,the author selected seventy six non-English major freshmen as the subjects,implementing the teaching experimental research for a semester.To ensure the reliability and validity of the experiment,this study adopted questionnaires,papers of pre-test and post-test,and semi-structured interviews have been involved in this study.The collected data was analyzed by SPSS 19.0.The results show that:(1)Students' awareness of multiliteracies is relatively weak,but they have optimistic attitudes towards to the multimodal PPT presentation;(2)Comparing the reading scores of the experimental group to those of the control group,it is found that the multimodal PPT is helpful for students' reading ability;(3)Based on the comparison of the total scores of the students of two groups,there are obvious differences in the multiliteracies between the experimental group and the control group before and after the experiment.Through the above research results,the purpose of this study is to provide a reference for teachers to improve college English reading teaching methods and help students to develop their multiliteracies.