Study Of The Utilization Of Multimodal Teaching In Primary School English Classrooms

The Ministry of Education requires that primary schools of each city and town must open English classes from the third grade. As a part-time elementary school English teacher, the present author had witnessed the inefficiency of some primary schools’ English classroom teaching for two years. With the advance of education, many classrooms are equipped with multimedia teaching equipment, but many teachers do not commit proper use of it. Some young teachers rely on multimedia teaching so much that they print all the content on their PPTs, or make their PPTs as colorful as possible to win the eye. Apparently speaking, it seems that this kind of teachers may instrumentally prepare their class teaching very well, because the classroom is bustling with multimedia. Practically speaking, however, the students don’t obtain the knowledge which they aim at. Sine children are so easily distracted, and they can be attracted to something more eye-catching(such as dynamic pictures on PPT), that they tend to ignore the learning objectives. On the contrary, some elder teachers resist the use of multimedia. In their opinion, it is a complete waste of time to make PPTs because they are not skillful at computer technology. Instead, they prefer to use chalks and blackboards for the teaching, which may bore the students. Therefore, the present author often think about how English teachers should improve English classroom teaching efficiency by combing primary students’ personalities with multimedia properly.This paper intends to explore a way to improve the efficiency of English teaching in primary schools by making proper use of multimedia-based multimodal teaching. The author tries to create a daily life learning environment in which students can improve their English performances without noticing the modes their teacher used. Research hypotheses are: the proper use of multi-modal teaching can improve students’ English scores and their motivation to learn, create a more interesting learning environment and enhance their vocabulary memorization.This thesis employs a comparative experimental method. Subjects are 60 fifth graders of two classes in a primary school where the author of this thesis is working for in Chongqing. The controlled class adopts the traditional teaching approach as usual, while the experimental class uses multimedia-based multi-modal teaching to fully mobilize the students’ five senses. The experiment includes three tests(pre-test, post-test and delayed-test) and two questionnaires. The author used SPSS 16.0 software to collect the experimental results conduct a statistical analysis of the data. Findings suggest that all the hypotheses are quite true, indicating that the proper use of multimedia-based multimodal teaching can improve primary school English classroom teaching efficiency.The author of this thesis hopes that the findings of this study can benefit primary school English classroom teaching.