An Application Of Multimodal Theory To Automobile English Vocabulary Teaching In Secondary Vocational School

With the rapid development of automobile industry in recent years,auto-repair workers are in short supply.In order to satisfy the need of job market,the school carried out a field investigation on the expectation of potential employers,the results of which revealed that most employers had expected auto-repair majors to master glossary of automobile and to have ability to communicate in simple English if necessary.Therefore,vocabulary learning turns out to be the focus of the course of automobile English.However,currently in secondary vocational schools traditional methods are still widely adopted in English teaching.These text-mode methods of teaching are unable to meet the demands of students of various characteristics in modern multimedia environment.So it is absolutely necessary to explore effective ways to improve vocabulary teaching and learning.Emerging in the western countries in the late 1990s,multimodal theory has been proved to have great impact on the instruction of many disciplines,including language teaching.Many teaching experts have published new research papers about the application of Multimodal theory.However,they focus more on its application to basic English teaching theoretically and less on empirical studies on teaching especially in secondary vocational schools.In view of the expertise and abstraction of automobile glossary,the thesis intends to demonstrate the feasibility and validity of applying the multimodal theory to automobile vocabulary teaching.The thesis first elaborates multimodal theory and the research of multimodal English teaching at home and abroad,discusses the necessity and feasibility of applying the multimodal theory to automobile vocabulary teaching theoretically.Then,to verify its effectiveness,one-semester teaching experiment is conducted,in which 98 students of 2016 majoring in automobile repair from Fujian Polytechnic School are taken as subjects and research tools such as testing,questionnaire and interview are applied.During the experiment,multimodal automobile English vocabulary teaching approach is employed in the experimental class(48 students),while the text-mode method is used in the control class(50 students).After the experiment,the software of SPSS is used to compute the experimental data.Through the analysis of the experimental data,combining the questionnaire and the interview,the thesis concludes that it is feasible and effective to multimodal theory to automobile vocabulary teaching in secondary vocational schools.On one hand,multimodal vocabulary teaching helps enhance the efficiency of word memorizing and applying,on the other hand multimodal vocabulary teaching improves students' test score and thus contributes to boosting students' interest in learning automobile vocabulary.But it has less positive effect on poor students for they seem to have made no progress in English.The results of this study have some implications for teaching vocabulary in secondary vocational schools both theoretically and practically.