Influence Of Multimodal Teaching On Students' Multimodal Literacy In High School English Teaching

Over the few decades, we are witnessing major changes in both the ways of communication and the approaches to teaching and learning. The rapid acceleration in the development of information and communication technologies during the last few years has resulted in many countries trying to launch projects in developing students learning styles and promoting the education reforms(New London Group, 1996) which includes China. Therefore, teaching English language literacy skills in contemporary EFL classrooms is changing dynamically to meet the demands of these changes. In addressing the challenges in teaching and learning of EFL, students require new approaches to understand literacies used in making meanings from multimodal elements and teachers are confronted with the need to adopt to various pedagogical approaches to cater for students' relevant needs.The multifaceted issues related to the educational context in China that is influenced by the expansion and increased use of Information and Communication Technology has prompted language teachers and researchers to use the Multimodal Approach to promote the teaching and learning of EFL. The theoretical framework of this study is Systemic Functional Linguistics(SFL), and the development of multimodal literacies is one of the key researches in systemic functional linguistics. It guides the researcher to design the research. This study sets out to answer the two questions: 1) What is the students' perspective of the multimodal literacy; 2) Can students improve their multimodal literacy through the multimodal instruction? For this application, the researcher selected two parallel classes in No. 27 Middle School in Lanzhou. Two different English teaching modes were applied in the classes. The experimental classes use the multi-modal PPT English teaching mode, while the controlled classes were taught with the traditional mode. In the study, the researcher employed statistical or computational techniques to investigate the students' perceptions and reflections on multimodal teaching process. Analyses and interprets students' multimodal products and other data for the purpose of discovering patterns of intersemiotic relationships as exhibited in students' products and the underlying meanings to further justify the findings.The study resulted in the following findings:(1) It is evident that student use of mediums other than language to communicate information was constrained by the focus on print as the most important information medium, and other systems as signs of meaning making.(2) The teacher and students drew on Resources of Available Design to create their multimodal composition.(3) Different inter-semiotic relations are demonstrated by students in the production of their multimodal compositions. The main content and the structure of the thesis are as follows: Chapter one is a brief introduction to the background, research purpose and significance, thesis structure. Chapter Two and Chapter Three are literature review and theoretical frameworks. Chapter Four describes the research design including research questions, subjects, instrument, process and data collection and analysis. Results and Discussion is arranged in chapter five. The last chapter is Conclusion and LimitationsThough the conclusions and this study have a certain reference value, it should also be noted that this study has some limitations and the research questions still need to be further explored.