An Analysis Of Distinguished English Teachers' Multimodal Classroom Discourse At Senior High School

Multimodal discourse is defined as the phenomenon that utilize various senses including auditory sense,visual sense,tactile sense,etc and realize the purpose of communication through the interaction of different semiotic modes which contain language,images,movements,sounds,etc.With the development of modern educational technology,as an instrument for organizing instruction and media for students' input,teachers' classroom discourse takes on a landscape of multimodality,namely,verbal and nonverbal modes are involved together to construct meanings for the purpose of facilitating the instruction.On the basis of the theory of systemic functional linguistic by Halliday and input hypothesis by Krashen,the research applies theoretical framework for multimodal discourse analysis and selects three distinguished teachers' teaching videos and PPT presentations from the 9th Session National Senior English Teaching Demonstration as participants so as to investigate how senior high school teachers take advantage of sufficient modes including verbal modes and nonverbal modes to optimize the instruction and the relationship between various modes.The detailed research questions are as follows:(1)What kinds of modes are applied by the distinguished senior high school teachers to facilitate the instruction in English classroom?(2)How do various modes distribute during different teaching steps?What are the functions of them?(3)What is the relationship between verbal and nonverbal modes?Besides,the research conducts a quantitative annotation on the modes involved in teachers' multimodal classroom discourse by means of the transcriptions of the video recordings,and carries out an analysis based on the collected data.Afterwards,the major findings of this research are displayed as follows:(1)The distinguished senior high school teachers can make full use of verbal modes including pure language mode and paralanguage mode as well as nonverbal modes which contains gestures,facial expressions,proxemics and PPT to facilitate the instruction.(2)The distributions of various modes vary in different teaching steps.The functions of them are reducing the difficulty of the tasks,reinforcing the memories,attracting students'attention and marking the critical features.(3)Verbal modes are the main modes and nonverbal modes are the secondary modes,and the relationship between them is reinforcement and complement.The research put forwards some implications that can enhance the effectiveness of senior high school English instruction:(1)English teachers need to improve the quality of spoken language.(2)English teachers need to pay much attention to nonverbal modes.(3)English teachers should be able to have a clear understanding of the functions of different modes in PPT and choose the most suitable one to assist the instruction.(4)English teachers had better take advantage of the relationship between various modes including reinforcement and complement.(5)English teachers should choose the proper and accurate modes to achieve the teaching objectives smoothly.