An Experimental Study On The Multimodal Teaching Of English Vocabulary In Junior High School

Vocabulary is an indispensable part of language,and vocabulary teaching constitutes a significant component of the whole English teaching system.Wilkins(1972:48)once stated that “without grammar,people can’t express many things;without vocabulary,people can’t express anything”.English vocabulary teaching should be attached enough importance to and fully developed.However,the current English vocabulary teaching methods adopted by most teachers in China contribute to the classroom anxiety of many Chinese students,feeling fear of taking English classes.The English Curriculum Standard for Compulsory Education specifies that English teachers need to find and use more efficient vocabulary teaching methods.In the teaching suggestions,it is clearly put forward that “modern educational technology and educational resources should be rationally used to improve students’ learning efficiency and provide students with an effective learning platform and development space”.Therefore,multimodal vocabulary teaching not only meets the requirements of the information age,but also can arouse students’ multiple senses and interest in learning,conform to students’ learning characteristics,and then enhance students’ learning efficiency to reduce English learning anxiety.Based on the theory of multimodal discourse analysis,this thesis adopts multimodal approach to teaching English vocabulary in two classes of Grade One of a middle school in Xi’an,Shaanxi province.First of all,the first word pass score of the first grade of junior high school were taken as pre-test scores,and then the students’ English classroom anxiety before the experiment was investigated by the first questionnaire.Based on these two data,two parallel classes,Class 2 and Class 9,are selected as the research objects,and then multimodal vocabulary teaching is carried out in both classes.Therefore,the author puts forward three experimental questions:(1)How does multimodal vocabulary teaching affect junior high school students’ vocabulary achievement?(2)Does multimodal vocabulary teaching affect junior high school students’ classroom anxiety? If so,how will it affect?(3)What are students’ attitudes towards multimodal vocabulary teaching?In order to answer the above three questions,this study adopts three research methods: vocabulary test,classroom anxiety questionnaire and attitude interview.After the test,the data is sorted out and entered into SPSS20 for analysis.By comparing the differences of English vocabulary achievement and classroom anxiety between the two classes before and after the experiment,this paper explores the influence of multimodal vocabulary teaching on vocabulary achievement and classroom anxiety.The findings of this study are as follows:(1)Multimodal teaching play a positive role in arousing students’ enthusiasm and interest and improving their English vocabulary achievement.(2)Multimodal teaching can motivate students’ multiple senses to participate in vocabulary learning,leading students to enjoy learning and relieving their classroom anxiety to some extent.(3)Most students have a positive attitude towards multimodal vocabulary teaching.(4)Compared with traditional vocabulary teaching,multimodal vocabulary teaching has substantially changed the roles and positions of teachers and students.There are still such limitations in this study as the relatively narrow research scope,short research time and limited research content.The research object will be expanded with the research time extending in the future research.