The Application Of Multimodal Teaching Approach To English Vocabulary Teaching In Senior High School

In senior high school English teaching,vocabulary teaching occupies an important position and directly influences students' English proficiency and examination results.It is as vital as English listening,reading,writing and grammar in the teaching process.However,for senior high students,the most challenging problem for them is that they can't memorize and consolidate the prescribed English vocabulary.Only by adopting proper measures can they improve the effectiveness of vocabulary learning.In the 1990s,some scholars in western countries have done large quantities of researches on multimodal discourse analysis.From then on,multimodal discourse analysis theory has been applied to teaching fields broadly.Multimodal teaching not only meets the demands of times,but also helps to deepen the English curriculum reform.However,most of the researchers focus on the theoretical discussion and neglect its empirical studies.Under this background,based on Multimodal Discourse Analysis and Information Processing Theory,the researcher conducted this empirical study to explore the effects of multimodal teaching approach on the vocabulary memorization of senior high school students.In addition,the question of whether the students take positive attitudes to multimodal teaching approach has also been investigated.The study lasted two and a half months.Two parallel classes(Class 7&Class 8)from Grade 2 in Zhangye NO.2 Middle School served as the research subjects to participate in the experiment.As for the two parallel classes,Class 7 is the experimental class and Class 8 is the controlled class.There are 50 students in the experimental class and 52 students in the controlled class.In order to make sure the target words are unknown to the subjects,another class(56)was chosen as the controlled class to do the pilot study.Before the experiment,all the subjects in EC and CC took part in pre-test to testify whether the English proficiency of the two classes has significant difference.By analyzing the relevant data collected from pre-test,the researcher found the subjects'English proficiency was at the same level,which assured the validity and reliability of the experiment.The same teaching content was employed in both of the classes.The only difference existed in the teaching methods.The experimental class received multimodal vocabulary teaching approach while the controlled class adopted the traditional vocabulary teaching approach.In the experiment,each subject participated in two vocabulary tests(immediate vocabulary test and delayed vocabulary test).The moment the 40-minutes experiment was over,an immediate vocabulary test was given to the subjects immediately,to test the results of subjects' short-term memory.Two months' later,an delayed vocabulary test was conducted to test the results of long-term memory of the target words.After teaching experiment,by comparing the results of two vocabulary tests between EC and CC,the researcher found that multimodal teaching approach effectively enhanced students' English vocabulary memorization at both short-term memory and long-term memory.In the end,the researcher distributed the questionnaires to the 50 students in the experimental class,and found out that multimodal vocabulary teaching approach has superiority over traditional vocabulary teaching approach in stimulating students' learning interest,improving vocabulary learning efficiency and enhancing students' vocabulary memorization.Meanwhile,the researcher also conducted interviews with some subjects from experimental class,which provided valuable teaching suggestions for multimodal teaching.However,because of small sample size and limited research time,there are a lot of shortcomings needed to be improved in the future.The researcher also hopes that this study is able to offer a valuable reference for vocabulary teaching in senior high school.