A Study Of Multimodal Teaching Of English Synonyms In Senior High School

Vocabulary teaching is an important part of language teaching,and how to teach synonyms effectively is one of the hard nuts to crack.The English Curriculum Standard for Senior High School(2017)points out that students should be able to express complex thematic meanings and viewpoints in synonyms and antonyms in authentic contexts.The theory of multimodal discourse analysis,which emerged in the 1990 s following systemic functional linguistics,has extended the scope of discourse research to vocabulary teaching,emphasizing probing into utterance meanings through different combination of modalities.Based on the above backdrop,this study adopts quantitative and qualitative analysis to probe the effectiveness of multimodal English synonyms teaching in senior high school.Two research questions are addressed:(1)Compared with traditional practice,is multimodal teaching more effective in helping participants master English synonyms? If so,what are the main advantages?(2)What is participants' acceptance of the multimodal English synonyms teaching? The research was conducted in two classes of Grade Two in a senior high school in Jinzhong city of Shanxi Province for four months.One is the experimental class(EC)with 51 participants,and the other is the control class(CC)with 53 participants.English synonyms teaching under the guidance of multimomdal theory were carried out in the EC,and traditional method were carried out in the CC.The research procedure can be divided into three phases: the pre-experiment stage,the while-experiment stage and the post-experiment stage.In the pre-experiment stage,a pretest,a pre-questionnaire and a teachers' interview were conducted to know the situation of English synonyms teaching and learning in senior high school.The teachers' interview was used as a qualitative supplement of three teachers in the internship school with diverse levels of experience.In the while-experiment stage,73 groups of English synonyms in Book Five and Book Six were taught with different methods in two classes.Multimodal English synonyms teaching was adopted in the EC,and traditional method was adopted in the CC.In the post-experiment stage,a post-test,a post-questionnaire and a students' interview were conducted to get the information of participants' English synonyms learning after one-semester teaching.The students' interview was used as a qualitative supplement of six participants in the EC with different levels of scores in the post-test.SPSS 22.0 software(the English version)was used to analyze the collected data.The research results show: multimodal English synonyms teaching,compared withtraditional teaching,helped participants master English synonyms better,especially middle achievers and underachievers,and their abilities of memory and autonomous learning of English synonyms had been improved after the experiment;most participants approved of multimodal English synonyms teaching after the experiment.The study also implies: teachers should teach participants learning strategies of English synonyms and develop their ability of autonomous learning;teachers should stimulate learners' interest in English synonyms learning through multimodal interaction;teachers should improve participants' memory competence with the help of modal inputs;teachers should create authentic language context to improve learners' comprehensive and pragmatic competence of English synonyms.