An Empirical Study Of The Application Of Multimodal Approach To English Vocabulary Teaching In Colleges

This paper mainly studies the application of multimodal approach in college English vocabulary teaching.Since 1990 s,multimodality has been studied over different disciplines,on distinct subjects and through various methods by many experts and scholars at home and abroad.Most research results are worth learning carefully in these studies.With the rapid development of modern education and information technology,the application of multimodality to all aspects of English teaching has attracted many scholars' attention.Besides,the application of multimodal theory on teaching and media has become the mainstream of multimodal research.As an indispensable part of English teaching,vocabulary teaching is closely combined with multimodal research,showing a vigorous development momentum.Based on the theory of multi-modal discourse analysis and dual-coding theory,this paper studies the following questions: 1)To what degree multimodal teaching affect college vocabulary learning(sound recognition,word spelling and meaning distinguishing)? 2)To what degree multimodal teaching affect short-term memory and long-term memory of college vocabulary? In order to find out the results of the above two questions,this study took 90 freshmen of a college as the research subjects,and carried out a four-month vocabulary teachingexperiment.These students come from two classes,one for the experiment class,another for the control class.Before the official teaching experiment,all of the students have a vocabulary level test,whose results show the equal performance between the two classes.In the nearly four-month experiment,the experiment class adopts the multimodal vocabulary teaching method while the control class conducts the traditional vocabulary teaching method.In the experiment,both the experiment class and control class were proceeded the English vocabulary immediate test and delayed test,and all the collected data were analyzed by using SPSS 21.0.The results are as follows:Multimodal vocabulary teaching method is effective in college English vocabulary teaching.After the nearly four-month long experiment,the vocabulary ability of the two classes had some progress:the increase of the experiment class' score is more significant than the control class' on the whole,and the experimental class performed better than the control class in the delayed vocabulary test.However,there are some slight difference in the specific aspects of vocabulary acquisition.They are,multimodal approach can enhance students' ability of sound recognition and distinguishing lexical meaning,but the effects on word spelling is not as good as the vocabulary method used before.Due to the limitation of time and place,the study has two main limitations in terms of the experimental duration time and the samplesize.The experiment only lasted 16 weeks,and only 90 subjects took part in the experiment so that the results of the study might not be so representative in general.For more precise results,further empirical studies should last a longer period of time and cover a larger sample size.