An Analysis Of Excellent English Teachers’ Classroom Teaching In Junior Middle Schools From The Perspective Of Multimodality

With the rapid technological innovation,the way of communication among people is undergoing significant changes.It is hard to investigate a comprehensive and thorough study of human communication discourse singly from the perspective of traditional discourse analysis.Therefore,the theory of Multimodal Discourse Analysis has come into being.With the upsurge of multimodal researches in the international linguistic field,the theory has also been widely applied in the research of classroom discourses.Teachers’ verbal and non-verbal modes,such as gestures,facial expression,images,audios and videos in slides,are all resources for semiotic meaning.However,the focus of current researches is mainly on the multimodal discourse analysis of English classroom in universities,but seldom on junior middle schools.In order to improve the effectiveness of English classroom teaching,on the basis of Systemic Functional Linguistics,Visual Grammar and Multimodal Discourse Analysis,this research takes three teaching videos of the 12 th National English Demonstration Class in junior middle schools as objects and explores the following three research questions:(1)What verbal and non-verbal modes do English teachers apply to facilitate teaching in junior middle schools?(2)What are the distribution and functions of verbal and non-verbal modes in English class of junior middle schools?(3)What’s the relationship between verbal and non-verbal modes?Through classroom observation and with the aid of an annotation software ELAN,this thesis analyzes three demonstration classes of first-prize teachers.The major findings are displayed as follows: first,in addition to verbal language mode,three teachers utilize body modes,such as gaze,facial expression,gestures,postures,etc.,as well as non-body modes including text and image in PPT slides.Second,different modes have different distribution.Pure language,as the main mode,followed with gaze and proxemics almost carries through the whole teaching process.Besides,smile,gestures,the combination of text and image enjoy high frequency of distribution,while audio and video modes are relatively in low distribution.Each mode serves as an important role,mainly to enliven classroom atmosphere,attract students’ attention,highlight key points and make the abstract concrete for better understanding and memorizing.Third,the relationship between verbal and non-verbal modes is mainly complement,reinforcement,contradiction and substitution.In view of the findings above,this thesis puts forward some implications for English teaching as follows:(1)English teachers need to improve the quality of spoken English―the main mode,with great attention to pronunciation and intonation.(2)Teachers need to enhance the multimodal awareness,particularly the non-verbal modes.(3)Teachers need to learn how to use modern instructional tool―PPT,which involves image,text and other modes,and improve the skills of creation level of PPT courseware.(4)Teachers need to learn to coordinate various modes and make use of the relationship between verbal and non-verbal modes to improve teaching effect.(5)During the teaching process,teachers select and choose modes appropriately according to the principle of “the optimal effect”.