A Study On The Application Of Multimodal Teaching To Junior English Vocabulary Teaching And Learning

As vocabulary is the building block of a language,a good command of it serves as the basis for the improvement of language learner's comprehensive abilities.Vocabulary learning not only means to enlarge one's breadth of vocabulary,but also to enhance one's depth of vocabulary.The study of vocabulary teaching and learning has always centered on these two aspects.With the widespread application of communication technologies such as internet and multimedia to language teaching,the transmission of educational information gradually presents to be multimodal.The traditional language-oriented single mode is gradually replaced by the multimodality of the sub-language such as images,music as well as symbols in modern education,which requires that the foreign language teaching should also be multimodal.Many scholars at home and abroad have carried out the related research of the application of multimodal theory into the field of language teaching and put forward multimodal teaching is beneficial for vocabulary learning.This study experimented on a junior school class to explore how multimodal teaching can help in vocabulary teaching and learning.The research subjects in this study are from two classes in Grade Seven in a public junior high school located in Hangzhou.The selected two classes were taught by the same teacher and their levels of English were close to each other.One class is the experiment group where multimodal vocabulary teaching was adopted;the other one is the control group where traditional vocabulary teaching was adopted.In the process of research,the author collected and analyzed the date through qualitative and quantitative methods such as questionnaires,interviews and tests and proved that multimodal teaching is a more effective vocabulary teaching method.This study aims to address the following three questions: 1.How can multimodal teaching help students in vocabulary learning in terms of breadth and depth? 2.How does multimodal teaching influence students' vocabulary retention and vocabulary learning strategy? 3.What is students' perception towards the application of multimodal teaching to vocabulary teaching and learning?The results show that:(1)Multimodal teaching has a positive effect on students' vocabulary learning,especially in promoting the depth of vocabulary;(2)Multimodal teaching helps students develop memory and social strategies for vocabulary learning;(3)Multimodal teaching,the application of complementary modalities in particular,contributes to the long-term memory of vocabulary;(4)Students hold a positive attitude towards multimodal teaching as it improves their initiative and enthusiasm for vocabulary learning.Therefore,in vocabulary teaching and learning,(1)Teachers and educators should actively use multimodal teaching,especially the application of complementary modalities;(2)Modal resource selecting should be appropriate;(3)Teacher-student interaction should be enhanced;(4)The training in long-term memory of vocabulary should be strengthened.