A Study Of Multimodal Discourse In College English Classroom

With the rapid development of modern science and technology, the ways ofcommunicating between people have changed greatly. The language-orientedcommunication has gradually been replaced by a new means of communication in theclassroom teaching, that is “the multimodal communication”. Under such socialcircumstances, the theory of multimodal discourse analysis came into being in the1990s in western countries, which is based on Halliday’s SFL theory, and it is appliedto picture, sound, gesture and other non-verbal semiotic resources. These semioticresources like language can be able to fulfill Halliday’s three broad communicativemetafunctions simultaneously. Based on this, Kress and Van Leeuwen put forward thetheory of visual grammar in their book Reading Images (1996,2006), holding thatother semiotic modes besides language can realize representational meaning,interactive meaning and compositional meaning of image.Through literature review of MDA at home and abroad, it can be concluded thatmost of scholars and researchers pay more attention to static discourses, such aspictures, textbooks, posters,etc., than dynamic discourses or three dimensional objects,such as classroom teaching, telecast or architecture.So this thesis will make a case study on a multimodal analysis of three typicalcollege English teachers’ teaching contest videos on the basis of the synthetictheoretical framework of MDA proposed by Zhang Delu and VG theory mentionedabove, and attempts to use multimodal analytical software ELAN4.5.0to make aquantitative annotation on semiotic modes used in multimodal teaching discourse, andcarries out a qualitative description on the collected data, the purpose of which is toexplore the multimodal semiotic characteristics of college English classroom and howthese semiotic modes make meaning. Through a careful observation and analysis, itcan be summed up the following major findings:1. It proves that an outstanding English teacher is not only expert at usinglanguage, but an expert of multimodal communication. In the teaching process, all thethree teachers use large quantity of non-verbal communicative channels to differentdegrees consciously or unconsciously, such as gesture, eye contact, facial expression,picture, sound, symbol and so on.2. It is universally acknowledged that college English classroom is by no meansa monomodal teaching but a multimodal teaching. Every semiotic mode does notfunction separately, only when they function synergically in teaching process, canthey produce and construct specific and profound meanings, and realize the bestteaching effects. In light of different teaching objectives of three texts, all the teachersuse the synergy and cooperation between verbal and non-verbal semiotic modes to successfully construct the representational meaning, interactive meaning andcompositional meaning of multimodal teaching.3. The major factors of selecting modality attribute to three aspects: field, tenorand mode. Of the three multimodal discourses, the auditory modality is main one thatdominates the whole communicative process; the visual modality intensifies orcomplements the auditory one. In addition, the first two teachers transfer students’tactual modality in the process of designing lead-in part.Research shows that as college English teachers, we should be concerned withthe students’ classroom performance that is a direct feedback on multimodal teaching,and flexibly adjust to the pedagogical methods and actively select the semioticresources available. Meanwhile, it is beneficial to promote the teachers’ professionaldevelopment by studying the multimodal college English classroom, which cancultivate more excellent English teachers.