Application Of Multimodal Teaching Into Junior High School English Reading Class

English reading plays a significant role in English teaching.The New English Curriculum Standards(2011)divides students' reading proficiency into nine levels.The junior high school students are expected to reach the fifth level at the year of graduation.However,the students have no interest in English reading class in current situation.They are asked to form good reading attitude and habits.Their reading proficiency needs to be improved as well.Therefore,it is of great necessity and importance to improve the current reading teaching so as to achieve efficient reading.Roland Barthes(1977)was the first scholar to put forward multimodal discourse analysis theory,which is one of the theoretical basis of multimodal teaching.New London Group(1996)discussed the application of multimodalities into language teaching.Multimodal teaching expects students to participate in reading actively by activating their various sensory organs such as vision,hearing,touch sensation,feeling etc.It is expected to improve their ability of gaining information and reading proficiency by various modalities such as videos,radios,flashes,pictures,colors,gestures,body languages and so on.The author of this thesis intends to apply multimodal teaching into English reading class in Shixia School,a junior high school in Shenzhen.It aims to come up with the reliability and feasibility of multimodal teaching in improving students' reading interest,attitude,habits and proficiency.The thesis is to explore the application of multimodal teaching into English reading class based on the theoretical basis of systemic functional linguistics,multimodal discourse analysis theory and constructivism theory.The experiment was carried out from February 13 to June 15 in 2017 lasted for four months.Two classes that have 88 students of the eighth grade in Shenzhen Shixia School were chosen randomly as the subjects by the author of this thesis.The author distributed 88 questionnaires to the two classes.It can be concluded from the questionnaire analysis that there are some problems in students' reading interest,attitude and habits.Specifically speaking,students have low interest in reading and they could not focus on class.They are reluctant to participate in class and show negative attitude on current reading mode.Their reading habits and skills require improving,too.Then the pre-test was conducted in the two classes.It was testified that there is no significant difference in the pre-test,thus,the two classes are parallel classes.One is controlled class with 43 students,the other is experimental class with 45 students.Then,the controlled class applied traditional teaching,while the experimental class applied multimodal teaching.After the experiment,the post-test was conducted in the two classes,and post-questionnaire was carried out in experimental class.It was testified that multimodal teaching can improve students' reading interest,attitude,habits and proficiency effectively after data analysis by SPSS 19.0 quantitatively and qualitatively.It shows that multimodal teaching has positive influence on improving students'reading interest,attitude,habits by data description and analysis of the questionnaire.Specially speaking,students become interested in reading and they can pay attention to class.They are willing to participate in class and they show positive attitude on multimodal teaching.Their reading habits and skills improved as well.It can be seen that students' reading ability improved effectively by data description and analysis of the two tests.All the facts show the validity and feasibility of multimodal teaching on junior high school students.At the same time,the study further explored the influences of multimodal teaching have on students of different reading levels,that is,the high level,the average level and the low level.The result indicates that multimodal teaching has a significant influence on students of different reading levels.However,there are still some demerits and limitation.Some suggestions are given by the author for future research.It is expected to have further exploration and improvement.