A Study On Application Of Multimodal Discourse Analysis Theory To English Reading Teaching In Junior Middle School

In this information age, reading is playing an increasingly important role in people’s life, especially in English teaching and learning. Reading is the foundation of English learning, reading skill is one of the most important skills for junior middle students to master. However, the present teaching method of English reading neglects the students’ ability to use language and their learning interest. The learning efficiency of students is very low, so is the efficiency of English reading teaching. Therefore, it is necessary to explore some more effective English reading teaching methods, so as to improve the students’ English reading ability and inspire their learning interest. At the same time,the development of the computer and technology brings a lot of changes to the people’s way of communication. Multimodal discourse analysis(MDA) emerges and arouses widespread concern of scholars. It has been used in teaching field since 1990 and achieved good effects. Based on these achievements, this research intends to apply the multimodal discourse analysis theory into English reading teaching in junior middle school.The author combed the related concepts and the relevant research results of the multimodal discourse analysis theory and the application of MDA in language teaching at abroad and home systematically at first. Based on the achievements of MDA in English teaching, the systemic functional theory and visual grammar, the author explored a multimodal teaching mode in reading class. The new teaching mode aimed at making the best of the visual grammatical meanings of different modal resources and applying various teaching methods to English reading class. In this teaching mode, the teacher should design various activities in reading class and give students more chances to participate in the multimodal teaching and learning. At the same time, there were enough interactions between teacher and students.In order to verify the effect of the new teaching mode, the author put forward the experiment. 126 students from two classes in a junior middle school participated in the study. One class was the Experimental Class(EC) and the other was the Control Class(CC). The traditional teaching mode was used in the Control Class(CC), while the multimodal teaching mode of the reading class was used in the Experimental Class(EC). The experiment lasted for 12 weeks, from September 2014 to January 2015. The author used questionnaires, tests and students’ classroom behavior observation interviews as the instruments of the research. At last, all of the data was collected and analyzed, the research got the following findings: 1) the multimodal teaching mode in English reading class is able to improve the reading proficiency of students in junior middle school. 2) the multimodal teaching mode in English reading class is able to arouse junior middle students’ reading interest and enhance their motivation.