Investigating The Effect Of Multimodal Writing Instruction On The English Writing Proficiency Of Non-english Major College Students

English writing,as an essential productive skill,can reflect students' comprehensive ability,which occupies a prominent position in foreign language teaching.However,according to the previous research and current situations of college English writing,its teaching effect remains to be improved.Under traditional writing teaching,teachers are frustrated by the unexpected results despite much investment in time and energy,while some students may lose the enthusiasm and confidence in writing due to the tedious teaching method and unfulfilled teaching result.Therefore,scholars and educators started to explore new teaching ways,among which multimodal English writing instruction receives much interest and attention.That is because all sorts of semiotics,tools and media can be employed to realize the communicative intention in such a technologically advanced world.Thus,this provides the opportunity for teachers to instruct with multimodal pedagogy.Although there are an increasing number of multimodal research,little empirical studies explore the connection between multimodal theory and writing.And most previous studies selected middle school students or college students as their participants.Non-English major college students,as the main force of university and society,are scarcely noticed.Consequently,they were selected as the participants of this research.This paper attempts to explore the effects of multimodal writing instruction on students' writing proficiency in terms of content,organization,vocabulary,language use and mechanics in contrast to traditional teaching.In order to know specific effects of multimodal teaching and students' perceptions,two research questions are proposed:(1).Does the application of multimodal writing instruction improve the writing proficiency of non-English majors? If so,in what aspects are the potentials of multimodal writing instruction represented compared with traditional writing teaching?(2).How does multimodal writing instruction influence students' interest and confidence in English writing?The teaching experiment has been conducted in one normal university of Jiang Xi for four months.The participants involved in this study were non-English major sophomores who took English as their second majors.They came from two parallel classes,a total of 86 students.One served as experimental group,which receivedmultimodal writing instruction.The other acted as control group,which was under traditional writing teaching.The instruments were made up of teaching experiment,questionnaire and interview.The pretest was held to confirm the students' initial writing level at the beginning of the semester.After the experiment,the posttest was given to compare the change of students' writing performance.The questionnaires were subsequently distributed to students in experiment group to know their opinions on multimodal writing instruction.And data from students' writing drafts were analyzed by SPSS 22.0.Moreover,in order to get more information about students' perceptions and attitudes towards multimodal writing instruction,five volunteers were invited to take a face-to-face semi-structured interview to enhance the reliability and validity of the experiment.Results indicated that through the integration and employment of different modes in the writing class,students' English writing proficiency has been significantly improved,especially in the content and vocabulary,which provides positive evidence for multimodal research.In addition,the coordination of multiple modes and writing fully mobilized students' senses,and attracted much attention of students,enabling them to actively participate in writing activities in such active writing environment.Consequently,students' passion and enthusiasm for writing was greatly stimulated.With multimodal writing instruction,the abundant and extensive knowledge,the autonomous and heated discussions,and the diversified and appealing activities facilitated students to complete the writing tasks well.Compared with traditional pedagogy,students became more confident in English writing.Therefore,this study provides some reference for English writing teaching.However,it is only a preliminary study without taking other factors and cases into account,so more in-depth and thorough research need to be further explored on the availability of multimodal writing instruction.