A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of MOOCs For British And American Literature In "Icourse"

In recent years,multimodal discourse analysis in English teaching has become one of the hot topics in the field of foreign language teaching.Based on the analysis of randomly sampled 15 online courseware videos respectively from 15 MOOCs for British and American literature on the “icourse”,this paper mainly focuses on three issues in order to provide constructive suggestions for MOOCs design:(1)what the characteristics of the distribution of different modes in 15 MOOC videos for British and American literature are?(2)what is the relationship between different modes in the 15 videos of MOOCs for British and American literature?(3)In the 15 videos of MOOCs for British and American literature,how do different modes achieve metafunctions? The theoretical basis of this study is systemic functional grammar,and the visual grammar of Kress and Van Leeuwen.In the process of research,firstly,according to the different types of MOOCs for British and American literature,fifteen videos of MOOCs for British and American literature were downloaded from the "icourse" as the corpus of the research.Then,according to the systemic functional grammar and the visual grammar of Kress and van Leeuwen,ELAN software was used to establish a corpus in which nine variables are adopted to annotate 15 videos from the perspective of action modes,visual modes,and auditory modes.According to the metafunctions of systemic functional grammar,this paper analyzes how different modes can realize the three metafunctions in MOOCs for British and American literature from the aspects of representational meaning,interactive meaning and compositional meaning.It is found that in the introduction of the course,teachers often choose to use visual modes,such as animation and slides,to stimulate students’ interest in learning.In the presentation and explanation of the course,teachers tend to use audio-visual modes,such as a variety of body movements and rich facial expressions,to diversify their classroom modes.The relationship between these modes is often complementary.In the end,this paper puts forward three suggestions on the multimodal teaching and design of MOOCs.First,in the aspect of action modes,the teacher does not needto use too many gestures to distract the students.No matter whether the teacher is standing or sitting in class,the best presentation of the teacher’s image in MOOC videos can be used to complete the teaching.Second,in terms of visual modes,teachers can use harmonious slide colors,exquisite figures,appropriate videos,and other visual texts to achieve better teaching effect.Thirdly,in terms of auditory modes,teachers should pay attention to the change of intonation and pronunciation,and use questions properly to arouse students’ thinking.