A Study Of English Teachers’ Classroom Multimodal Metadiscourse

In the process of communication, the human constructs meanings through not only theverbal symbols, but also the use of non-verbal symbols, e.g., body language, gestures, facialexpressions and audio video. In this situation, the discourse is multimodal discourse.Metadiscourse is the way speakers organize their own words, express their attitude to thecontent of discourse and guide listeners to comprehend discourse. And metadiscourse is partof the multimodal discourse. The thesis attempts to study the definition, identification andclassification of multimodal metadiscourse. The aim is to reveal how humans use a variety ofsymbols to indicate discourse structure, to express their feelings and attitudes to the discourse,concerning the audience’s reaction; at the same time, this paper studies the discourse ofoutstanding English teachers from the perspective of multimodal metadiscourse, and focus onthe relationship between multimodal metadiscourse and the efficiency of teaching, so as toprovide new teachers and ordinary teachers with teaching language reference, in order topromote teachers’ professional skills.The research object of this paper is twelve English teachers’ discourse, especiallymultimodal metadiscourse in quality classes. And these teachers are from primary school,middle school, high school and colleges or universities. The thesis attempts to study therelationship between teachers’ multimodal metadiscourse and teachers’ metacognition,audience awareness, rhetoric consciousness and the ability of context construction; at thesame time in this paper, the author compare the differences of using multimodalmetadiscourse between two university teachers.This study finds that:1) the proper use of multimodal metadiscourse in class shows thatteachers have the awareness of audience and rhetoric, considering the students’ needs, andactively interacting with students, making their teaching content more easily acceptable tostudents;2)the active use of multimodal metadiscourse suggests that teachers at any time calltheir metacognition for utterance planning, monitoring, evaluation and adjustment,andclassroom discourse is the result of consideration;3) the appropriate and reasonable use of multimodal metadiscourse can construct classroom context, which makes the studentsunderstand the linguistic context, situational context and cultural context, closely follow theteacher ’s classroom rhythm, understanding the teaching contents better. In this paper,theauthor also finds that the two award-winning teachers have great differences in the use ofmultimodal metadiscourse:1)two teachers both actively use interactive metadiscourse,making teaching steps clear for students,so the students can understand the teaching contentbetter;2)the teacher who won the first prize for teachers use more interactional metadiscoursethan the one winning award, the former communicate with students more frequently than thelatter;3)there are great differences in the use of non-verbal symbols metadiscourse,theformer uses more and naturally,and her pronunciation and intonation is correct and reasonable.In the above findings, this thesis presents strategies of using a multimodal metadiscourse.Finally, the author draws a conclusion of this study and points out the inadequate points andthe direction of further research at the end of the thesis.