Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of College English Class

Since1990s, many researchers home and abroad have made great contributions to multimodal discourse analysis from different perspectives. There are also a lot of studies on college English teaching, however, there are few studies dynamically analyzing the multimodality on college English class. Based on the previous studies, this paper applies Halliday’s functional grammar and the visual grammar of Kress and Van Leeuwen as the basic theoretical framework, and conducts a dynamic multimodal analysis to college English class.This paper tries to answer the following four questions:1) What is the general situation of teachers’awareness of multimodality and how do they use it?2) Compared with single-modality teaching, what is the advantage of multimodal teaching?3) What is the relationship of each modality and How to coordinate different modality?4) What is the feedback to multimodal teaching from the students? Three teachers and50students are selected as the subjects. Before the experiment, the teacher subjects are conscious of the purpose while the student subjects are not. They are all teaching comprehensive English for non-English majors of grade one. All of them have a MA degree and have received training in teaching pedagogy. Their teaching time is3,5, and10years respectively. For simplicity of description, the three teachers will be labeled as T1, T2, and T3. The student subjects are composed of50freshmen, whose English language proficiencies can be relatively divided into three levels according to their examination scores after entering college:the high proficiency level (80-90); the medium proficiency level (70-80) and the low proficiency level (55-70). For simplicity of discussion, these three language proficiency levels will be abbreviated as HP, MP and LP. Then three teachers will adopt different teaching to these50students:T1uses PPT to teach (Case A), T2adopts multimodal teaching (Case B), while T3uses traditional teaching (Case C). For each class, there will be50minutes. And after it, a test will be conducted immediately in order to examine how well they have acquired from each class. In order to make the result more reliable, the three teachers all do it three times for different lectures with their own ways. And for each test, there will be an interval of three days, that is the experimental lecture is done every3days.After the analysis of the data collected, the paper gets the following conclusions:1) among all the teachers interviewed65%teachers can apply the multimodal teaching into class even only15%know very well the term of multimodality.2) Case A is a little better than Case C, but the advantage is not so obvious. Case B does not work very well to HP students, however, it can improve the students’overall average score since the majority is composed of MP students and LP students. Meanwhile, from the students’feedback to the use of multimodality, they also prefer case B, as it efficiently makes them take active part in the class and improves their interest and scores.The paper provides two implications for teachers:1) The teachers should enhance their awareness of multimodal teaching.2) According to this study, Case A and Case C can not fully achieve the perfect teaching. Teaching is cooperation of visual and auditory modality. Formally, each modality is self-dependent, but only if many modality work together, the teaching quality can be guaranteed. However, there are some limitations:the subjects and the data are narrow in scope, so it can not fully represent the other teachers and students. Furthermore, the students’ personalities and gender are not mentioned in the study.As a summary, the author hopes the thesis can provide a new angle on the study of college English teaching, enrich the application of multimodal discourse analysis in college English class, and bring implications to college English teaching.