A Multimodal Analysis Of The Teacher-Student Interaction In EFL Classroom Of High Schools

Teacher-student interactions in foreign language classes are filled with various modes. Gestures, gazes, head movements, facial expressions along with language from the teacher are all semiotic resources and expression of the students is also multimodal. Besides, the introduction of audio-visual technology into the class further diversifies the semiotic resources. Through a multimodal analysis of the teacher-student interactions which are the mediation process in this research, the current research aims to present a multimodal panorama of the mediation process, achieve a dynamic and comprehensive understanding of the process, discover the functions each of the modes performs and the mediation effect they achieve so as to give suggestions as to how to orchestrate various modes.Multimodal analysis has systemic-functional linguistics founded by Halliday as its theoretical basis, of which the thoughts of meaning potential and metafunctions are embraced by the current research. All modes like language have the historically shaped and culturally made meaning potential, which is realized in a certain communicative context, and they all have the conceptual, interpersonal and textual functions. The sociocultural theory founded by Vygotsky emphasizes the mediation roles semiotic tools play in human’s mental development. The mediation tools are the various semiotic modes. Based on the theory of meaning potential and metafunctions, it can be considered that the mediation tools in the form of various modes in the teacher-student interactions can not only play the cognitive role to promote students’ language learning and the affective role to adjust students’ emotion, but also can act as cohesive factors in the whole process. The ecological view of cognition consistent with the essence of sociocultural perspective reminds that in the mediation process the participants are both employing various modes to provide feed back and to make modification.Guided by the theoretical framework above, the current research, by taking advantage of the method of conversation analysis and using turn as the analysis unit, makes a multimodal analysis of the teacher-student interactions in high school English classes. Six interaction episodes in English classes have been selected from an authoritative English teaching website, and they are categorized in terms of new word explanation, grammar instruction and ideological concept construction. In the analysis, the metafunctions of the modes, their interrelations in co-constructing meaning and their roles in mediation are attended to. The major findings are as follows:1) Whatever the teaching content is, the teacher employs various semiotic modes at hand to achieve a perfect teaching effect. The employment of various modes can help the students to connect the target language with the object world directly without reference to mother language, provide them with the opportunities to use the target language in a certain context and help them construct the abstract meaning from concrete events; 2) Modes appearing at the same moment can realize at least one of the metafunctions, and they together accomplish the meaning construction; the complementation of modes is realized in either the enhancement of one meaning or the coordination of more than one meanings; 3) While performing the metafunctions, modes are achieving mediation effect, during which the conceptual meaning is usually related to the cognitive mediation and the interpersonal meaning is related to the affective mediation; 4) Attention to the multimodal expression of students by the teacher can promote the mediation process.