A Multimodal Discourse Study On Teaching Models Of Primary English Teachers

Multimodal discourse,a hot topic since 1990 s,is a language phenomenon which applies auditory,visual,tactile or other senses to communicate with each other by combining various means and semiotic resources,such as language,images,actions,etc.In recent years,multimodal discourse analysis has received much attention from scholars both at home and abroad.However,most of the subjects employed in studies are teachers in public universities and secondary schools.In addition,most of the studies are static.Therefore,a very obvious limitation is that almost no dynamic studies are conducted on primary teachers' discourse in training institution.The thesis attempts to combine quantitative and qualitative research methodology to explore what modes are used in English teaching contests from one training institution and how teachers make full use of modes to realize the representational meaning,the interactive meaning and the compositional meaning based on Kress and van Leeuwen's visual grammar and Zhang Delu's synthetic framework.In order to ensure the objective analysis on the 4 videos of teachers' discourse,the latest version-ELAN5.0.0,a professional annotation software for multimodal discourse analysis,is used in the observation.The research procedures are as follows: firstly,the author collects the teaching contest videos in the training institution.After that,the author observes the videos carefully,cuts some redundant parts in videos with the aid of Format Factory and then chooses four videos for the following analysis;secondly,the author observes the four videos carefully,then defines the types and subordinate tiers and makes a tagging list;thirdly,the ELAN5.0.0 is applied here to annotate the four videos and then some data of teaching features can be collected from annotation results;finally,each video is cut into six phases and the modes employed in each phase are examined so as to reveal how these modes are combined to realize the three meta-functions.Through careful observation,the research results show that: Firstly,English teaching contests involve many different modalities: auditory modality,visual modality,behavior modality and oral modality.Except for oral modality(58.022%),the main modality in each video is behavior modality(13.475%)or visual modality(9.194%),the last one is auditory modality(3.005%).Secondly,more than one mode is designed by teachers in each phase.However,in different stages,teachers should combine different types of modality to complete teaching objectives and implement semiotic functions.Generally speaking,in the beginning and ending parts,behavior modality can complement oral modality to realize interactive meaning;in the warm-up and review part,in order to construct the interactive and compositional meaning,behavior modality and auditory modality can strengthen oral modality;in the introduction and explanation and practice parts,behavior modality and visual modality are indispensable to create representational meaning and interactive meaning,while visual modality are also inseparable to achieve compositional meaning in this part;in the conclusion part,behavior modality and visual modality can strengthen oral modality to produce interactive and compositional meaning.These findings show a new perspective both for teachers and schools.For teachers,the thesis provides some proper modes for different stages and a set of new teaching pattern.For schools,it is a trend to take advantage of the modern technology to offer some convenient facilities for teachers to design the proper modes.