A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Teachers’ Non-verbal Behaviors In Multimedia Class

With the development of information technology, multimedia equipment has become animportant means of teaching assistance. Teachers can use various media and technologies topreserve, process and transmit the information in oder to optimize foreign language teaching andlearning. In multimedia language class, teaching is not merely realized by linguistic mode butteachers’ non-verbal behaviors, like gesture, gaze, head movement, facial expressions, posture andproximics are all the meaning-making resources. In addition, classroom teaching is carried throughtwo or more modes simultaneously, such as, teachers’ use of PPT is the combination of visual modeand auditory mode. This kind of communication that realized through many senses such as hearing,sight, touch and applied lots of means and symbolic resources like languages,acts,sounds andimages is called muotimodal discourse.This thesis analyzes the teachers’ non-verbal behaviors and visual modes in PPT coursewarebased on Multimodal Discourse Analysis and Systemic Functional Linguistic, aiming to verify thefollowing three questions:1) what kind of non-verbal modes can be applied to facilitate languageteaching;2) how do various modes cooperate in class;3) how do various modes realize themeta-functions. The author chooses the video of1stSFLEP (Shanghai Foreign Language EducationPress) National College English Teaching Contest as analysis material, three teachers who get first,second and third prize respectively as subjects and observation method and case study as researchmethodology, expecting this thesis will be of help in arousing the teacher’s awareness on non-verbalbehavior, promoting the quality of classroom teaching and learning and enriching the theory ofmultimodal discourse analysis.The thesis has five chapters. Chapter one is an introduction to the research background,significance and the thesis structure. Chapter two offers a detailed literature review of Systemicfunctioanl linguistic, Visual grammar and Non-verbal communication, which will provide a solidfoundation for the following analysis. Chapter three is mainly about the research design andmethodology. Chapter four is the detailed case study on the teaching contest video of the threeteachers from two perspectives: actional modes, visual modes. Chapter five states the major finding,implications, limitations and suggestions for further study.