A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Excellent Teachers' Non-verbal Behaviors In Senior High School English Class

With the progressive development in modern science and technology,the ways that people transmit the messages have greatly changed.Language-oriented communication has been gradually replaced by multimodal communication.The same is true for the classroom teaching.In modem classroom,apart from language mode,non-verbal behaviors including gesture,facial expressions,and eye contact play an important role in achieving excellent teaching interaction.On the basis of Kress and Van Leeuwen's Visual Grammar,this thesis tried to answer the following questions:(1)How do semiotic modes used in the senior English teaching realize the representational meaning?(2)How do semiotic modes used in the senior English teaching realize the interactive meaning?(3)How do semiotic modes used in the senior English teaching realize the compositional meaning?Four excellent English teachers' teaching videos were selected as the research samples,which came from The Ninth National Senior High School English Teachers' Teaching Demonsteation and Research Competition.With the aid of multimodal analytical software ELAN,this study made a quantitative annotation on semiotic modes used in teachers' classroom teaching and a qualitative description of the collected data,aiming to explore how three meta-functional meanings were constructed by non-verbal semiotic modes in English classroom teaching.The major findings of the present study are presented as follows:Firstly,more importance was attached to narrative representation rather than conceptual representation.On the one hand,narrative representation can be categorized into action process,reactional process,speech and mental process.From the four teachers' teaching videos,it can be found that action and reactional processes were emphasized,the meaning of which was mainly realized through the communication between teachers and students;However,in their designed slides,focus was mainly placed on action process.On the other hand,compared with analytical process and symbolic process,more emphasis was laid on classificational process in their slides to realize conceptual representation.Secondly,eye contact,gestures and social distance were largely used by the four teachers in classroom to realize interactive meaning.To be specific,gazing at one student and facing forward to the whole class which were included in eye contact,accounted for about half of the whole class time respectively.Furthermore,deictic gesture was the most frequent used type of gestures,followed by iconic gesture and beat gesture.In terms of social distance,informal distance and personal distance was widely used while the formal one rarely appeared.Thirdly,the strategies of top-down layout,rich font,color,overlap,separation and integration were mainly ermployed in slide designing to realize compositional meaning including such three subsystems as information value,salience and framing.The top-down layout strategy was mostly preferred by the four teachers to express information value,the strategies of font,color and overlap to show salience,and the strategies of separation and integration to construct framing.Based on above findings,some pedagogical implications can be obtained.Firstly,it is important for teachers to improve their awareness of using various modes to intensify their teaching effects.In particular,they should pay more attention to non-verbal semiotic modes which may be neglected and apply them appropriately in accordance with the teaching objectives and contents.Secondly,when designing the slides,teachers should employ appropriate font,color,overlap to make the teaching contents more prominent so as to draw students' attention on some key points.Thirdly,it is of great importance to cultivate students' ability of multiliteracies.With this kind of ability,students could better understand various modes including pictures,texts,and color which occur in the ppt,thus better mastering what the teachers teach.