Multimodal Genre Analysis Of Business English Micro-lectures

As an innovative teaching resource,English micro-lectures are hopefully being used in China due to the advantages like being short in time,concentrated on tightly defined contents,convenient in on-line use,and helpful in enhancing the situations of reforming traditional College English teaching in China.Recent contests and competitions of micro-lectures make these lectures gradually accepted and increasingly popular for the future use in flipped classrooms in China like those widely used online videos in this model in foreign countries.This situation leads to increasing numbers of researches on proposals of successful design and application of micro-lectures from a macro level at home.However,the outstanding characteristic of multimodality in micro-lectures is underrepresented and there is a lack of appropriate theory in these researches.This study takes a first step to apply genre theory to the dynamic mutlimodal discourse.It aims to work out how particular features make contributions to meaning making in micro-lectures by analyzing the genres and tries to provide implications on making micro-lectures for success.Genre theory deals with recurrent configurations of meaning that enact the social practices of a culture based on systemic functional linguistics and focuses on major types of genre like stories,histories,reports andexplanations,procedures,etc.This study focuses on analyzing specific micro-lectures selected from one large-scale competition—the First Micro-lecture Contest of Foreign Languages in China.A quantitative method is first used to select 12 typical English business micro-lectures from all the works in the competition.Then a qualitative method is used to analyze the phases,stages and genres of the targeted micro-lectures and their features in details.It can be found that(1)these business English micro-lectures have such successful practices in mode as good beginning,harmonious combinations of subtitles and music,creative semiotic modes,and effectiveness of realia and some unsuccessful ones like inconsistent phases and over-speed modes;(2)practices in field and tenor include the followings:wise choices of genre assist in reaching goals;clarity and simplicity of phases make sure the teaching design is clear;the micro-lectures of building skills mainly show the teaching ideal of student-centered while those of building knowledge tend to be teacher-centered;appropriate methods in combination with recorded PowerPoint slides have better teaching effect;time spent on the important and difficult points is longer than other teaching parts.In one word,excellent micro-lectures have clear and achievable goals,are well structured and do not over-complicate the range of semiotic modes that can be drawn upon to instruct learners new skills or deepen their knowledge-base.In terms of theoretical importance,this study applies genre theory belonging to linguistic field to the field of language teaching and learning research which makes it an interdisciplinary research to some degree.Moreover,it extends the research on multimodality in the practice of lecturing.In terms of practical importance,this study does not focus on proposals of micro-lecture like prior research from a macro level but takes the real micro-lecture samples from a representative competition as the targeted subjects from a micro level and finally further brings out practical implications on meaning making of micro-lectures.