A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of The College English Teaching

With the rapid development of information technology, especially the development of multimedia technology, great changes have taken place in the way we communicate:the non-verbal means, including images, animation, action, etc. has become indispensable elements of communication. Therefore, a new kind of discourse analysis—Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) emerges. The social semiotic school taking the perspective of Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics has been the mainstream. They believe other non-verbal semiotic resources, such as images, gestures, actions, etc., similar to language, also have three metafunctions:ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function.The discourse of current college English classes, with verbal, visual, actional and audio-visual modality, is a typical multi-modal discourse. However, nowadays the empirical researches about multimodal teaching are rare. This study attempts to make a multimodal analysis of three college English teacher's teaching contest videos, with Halliday's SFL theory, especially the three metafunction theory, Kress and van Leeuwen's visual grammar and Zhang Delu's synthetic analytical framework as the theoretical framework. This thesis attempts to combine the quantitative approach and qualitative approach, with the aid of the professional annotation software ELAN 4.9.0, aiming to explore what particular modes are more used by the teachers and how the various modes cooperate to realize the ideational, interpersonal and textual function. Through a deep and systematical observation and analysis, the main conclusions can be drawn below:Firstly, when realizing the ideational function, the teachers use more visual modalities, mainly including these modes:images, text, color and font, etc., apart from the verbal modality. The actional modality ranks next to the visual modality, for example, the teachers adopt some gestures and postures in this process. In the process the teachers' explaining of new words and the main idea of the passage, the cooperation among various modes can achieve the ideational functions that single mode can't.Secondly, when it comes to the interpersonal function, the teachers tend to use more actional modality besides the verbal modality. The specific modes include the proxemics, esp. the personal distance, gazing at one certain student, nod and smile, etc. With the interplay of verbal means (including the rising intonation and falling intonation) and postures, the teacher can express the interpersonal meaning such as, equality, kindness and encouragement and create harmonious teaching atmosphere.Thirdly, in terms of the textual meaning in multimodal teaching, on the one hand, at the macro-level of cohesion of two teaching procedures, the teacher mainly depends on the instructional directions such as "today, I want to…" and "let's…" and accompanied by some actional modality, such as deictic gestures and beat gestures. On the other hand, at the micro-level, the textual meaning in terms of the visual elements mainly the PPT courseware, the modes such as texts, symbols, colours and fonts included in the PPT slides follow the three principles of the compositional meaning in visual grammar. Thus, the textual meaning is constructed.