On The Meaning Making In Multimodal Text

Along with the progress of information technology and the renovation of teaching philosophy, Power Point courseware has been widely applied in English teaching classroom. In this case, foreign and domestic scholars have already taken a great deal of researches on this object from the perspectives of technological application, courseware design, and teaching application and so on, but only a few of them have adopted the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis. The paper,based on Halliday’s Metafunctions, Kress & Van Leeuwen’s “Visual Grammar” as well as Martinec & Salway’s Image-Text Relations theory, constructs a multimodal framework for PPT courseware. The study selects the section A PPT courseware slides of New Horizon College English Reading and Writing book 1 to book 4 as the research objects. In line with the multimodality of the slides, the paper adopts case analysis and data statistics methods to discuss how text mode realizes its meaning from three aspects concerning ideational function, interpersonal function, textual function, and how image mode realizes its meaning from representation function, interactive function, and compositional function. Finally it explores the relations between image and text and their combined meaning making from two aspects: status relation and logical semantic relation.It’s found that there are three characteristics in the multimodal meaning making by analyzing PPT courseware: firstly, using bold font, gorgeous color and orderly space layout of text mode to present the teaching key points of each module which can highlight the authority and credibility of information, and it also can focus their attention on capturing the key points quickly for them to comprehend and memorize; secondly, using the visualization and specific of image modal to make teaching difficulties clear and easy for students to understand, and a large amount of heads-up angle pictures draws closer to students which can provide real language learning contexts for them, thus they can easily absorb the teaching contents; thirdly, using vivid images to fill and strengthen the text meaning, also to create a multimodal communication learning atmosphere for students by combining image and text modal. On the basis of above characteristics of PPT courseware’s multimodal meaning making, the paper proposes some teaching suggestions for PPT courseware according to the teaching goals, teaching contents as well as the deficiencies in meaning making: the first is to follow the principles of multimodal PPT courseware; the second is to improve the design quality of the PPT courseware; the third is to improve the teachers and the students’ multiliteracies.The study aims to put forward some suggestions for college English multimodal PPT courseware teaching, and arouses the college English teachers to give more attention to the multimodal PPT courseware meaning making. Teachers are required to make good use of multimodal resources to design high quality PPT courseware, which will be a truly effective auxiliary teaching device.