A Humanism-Based Multimodal Study Of English-Learning Soft Discourse On WeChat

In the era of new media,screen has taken the place of print media in terms of humanistic multimodal design to expand the expression of social meaning,exploiting the studies of multimodal semiotics.Multiple modes have joined the meaning-making semiotics family in transferring multimodal meaning,thus setting higher requirements on multiliteracy for designers and audience.WeChat,generally regarded as a communicative application,has hardly been studied on its meaning-making function from the perspective of semiotics and multimodality.This research applies a qualitative method——MDA,along with some quantitative statistic analysis on humanism,to do a synthetic analysis on the selected 116 English-learning Soft Discourses published in July 2018 by Chinadaily_mobile on WeChat.The present research has established a new analytical model—Multimodal Affective Design Model—to solve three research questions:(1)What are the modalities of English-learning Soft Discourses on WeChat to construct meaning?(2)In the process of transferring multimodal meaning,how does the visual/audio design of English-learning Soft Discourses reduce anxiety and enhance motivation.respectively?(3)Which inter-modal relationship better reflects humanistic affective design?Through case study,the findings could be concluded as follows:1.The English-learning Soft Discourse on WeChat has in total four kinds of modalities:image,text,video and audio.2.The major affective multimodal design of Soft Discourses are:a).To reduce anxiety:providing images of offer act to weaken the eye contact,etc.in visual design;softening figure sound to form personal social distance,etc.in audio design.b).To enhance motivation:applying lines,images,colors,shades to segregate the discourse,etc.in visual design;applying sound of high quality to increase intimacy,etc.in audio design.3.The complimentary relations of multimodal learning resources are more suggested to be applied in humanistic design.The thesis has made an attempt to conduct an interdisciplinary study on multimodal semiotics and humanistic pedagogy,expanding the research scope and boosting the vitality of multimodal discourse analysis to some degree.