The Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Teacher Talk In Senior High School High-Quality English Reading Classes

With the highly developed modern information technology,various types of symbol resources can convey meaning.People's communication methods are no longer limited to"language",but involve many symbolic systems such as body movements,images,and sounds.Therefore,multimodal discourse analysis theory came into being.In recent years,multimodal discourse analysis theory has been widely used in classroom discourse studies,but researchers mainly concentrated on university classrooms and paid little attention to high school classroom teaching.Based on Halliday's(1978/1994)Systemic Functional Linguistics and Kress and van Leeuwen's(1996)Visual Grammar,this thesis analyzes five videos of The 10th National English Demonstration Class in Senior High School with the following three research questions:1)What are the distribution features of modal resources in senior high school English reading classes?2)What are the functions of different modes in senior high school English reading classes?3)How do different modal resources interact with each other to construct representational,interactive,and compositional meanings?With the help of ELAN,detailed annotation and analysis of five first-prize teachers of The 10th National English Demonstration Class in Senior High School is conducted and the results are as follows:First,senior high school English reading classes have multimodal features,making full use of such modal resources as language,images,gestures,and gaze,etc.The structure of the reading classes can be roughly summed up as the following six stages:Class Beginning(CB)--Introduction of the Topic(IT)--Teaching Content(TC)--Discussion(DS)--Summary(SC)--Finish(FI).TC and DS have the most abundant modal resources,while only a few for CB and FI.TC involves all modes,among which the most widely used is intonation,gesture,visual text and posture.Images and embedded videos are the least used.Spoken language,as the main mode,together with gaze and proxemics goes through the whole teaching process.Second,prosody,including intonation and stress,mainly acts as a complementary way to support spoken language to express interactive meaning.Within intonation,PIF is the most often used,followed by PIR,PIFR and PIRF.For gestures,beat gestures and deictic gestures have the highest frequency,which are mainly used to draw attention and emphasize key information.Iconic gestures and metaphoric gestures mainly assist in the interpretation of knowledge.Therefore,gesture can realize both the representational and interactive meanings.PPT,the main way to construct compositional meaning,includes four types of resources:visual text,images,text&image,and symbols,of which visual text and text&image account for the largest proportion.Visual text mainly uses colors,bold and underlines to emphasize information and attract attention.Text&image mainly reflects three kinds of relations:elaboration,extension and enhancement.Third,in the process of senior high school English teaching competition,teachers construct representational,interactive and compositional meanings through collocation and interaction with multiple modes.Studies have shown that teachers construct"representational meaning" through the narrative process,including action process and reaction process.Deictic gestures and gaze in actional mode are usually used to construct vectors.The construction of "interactive meaning" involves three dimensions:distance,eye contact and attitude in which teachers primarily apply proxemics,gaze and visual pictures,accompanied by intonation and postures,etc.The "compositional meaning",including information values,salience and framing,is realized by the use of PPT visual modes such as visual text,diagrams,and text&image.Based on the above findings,this paper proposes the following suggestions for the application of multimodal discourse analysis theory in senior high school English classroom:1.Teachers should be clearly aware of the multimodality features of English classrooms and nurture a comprehensive teaching method by using a variety of modes to fully express the meaning.2.Teachers should know the functions and roles of various major modes,and learn to use relevant modes to improve teaching effectiveness scientifically.3.Teachers should pay much attention to the guiding role of multimodal discourse theory in English teaching,and conduct multimodal discourse analysis in daily education and teaching actively.