A Multimodality Discourse Analysis Of College English Teaching

For thousands of years,written language has occupied the dominant position in social communication,and the means of communication used by people only focused on the form of language and writing.With the rapid development of information technology,people send information through a variety of ways,including graphics,pictures,audios,videos etc.The phenomenon of communicating in a variety of ways such as language,action,sound,image and many semiotic resources is the multimodality discourse.Nowadays,it is impossible to analyze the discourse comprehensively only from the perspective of language,because the meaning of the discourse is also reflected by other non-linguistic factors.Under such circumstances,multimodal discourse analysis rising in the 1990 s has been a hot topic in linguistic research at home and abroad.The quick development of information technology has great impacts on people's communication as well as on the interaction of teachers and students.In the classroom,knowledge can be imparted from teachers by means of various modalities,including videos,animations,diagrams,and PowerPoint(PPT).The change of teaching pedagogy and diversification of teaching materials have brought about the rise of multimodal discourse in the classroom.The discourse analysis that has been done so far is largely restricted to language itself.Attention has been paid to the language system and semantic structure and their relation to culture and cognition,with other ways of meaning making such as images,sounds,colors and flashes ignored.Multimodal discourse analysis,which started in the 1990 s in the west,can solve this problem to a great extent.The theory of social semiotics and systematic functional linguistics provide a theoretical framework for multimodal analysis of classroom discourse.The semiotics emphasizes the interaction between semiotic resources and the realization of the meaning of the text;at same time,it embodies the ideational meaning of semiotics and realizes interpersonal meaning.The systemic functional linguistics holds the view that semiotic systems other than languages are the source of meaning as well.According to the theory of three meta-functions of language in the systemic functional linguistics,multimodal discourse also has ideational function,interpersonal function and textual function.Moreover,the register theory claims there exist a close relationship between contextual factors and multimodal discourse interpretation of the meanings.This study,based on the theory of semiotics and systemic functional linguistics,collects data from the Fourth Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press(SFLEP)National College English Teaching.It chooses four excellent teachers' teaching demonstration for the case study.Through both qualitative and quantitative analysis,this study attempts to answer the following four questions:1.What kinds of modalities are used for teaching in the classroom?2.How do teachers coordinate different modalities to achieve teaching objectives in different classes?3.What are the common features of teachers in the use of multimodal teaching?4.What are the differences of teachers in the use of multimodal teaching?Findings show that:1.In the classroom,teachers utilize a variety of modalities in teaching,mainly including two kinds of modalities,verbal and non-verbal language modalities,among which the two most commonly used modalities are verbal language of teachers and visual ones.Besides,there are other modalities like classroom design,the teacher's body language,teaching PPT courseware.2.In different teaching procedures,teachers often use two or more than two modalities combined which are most suitable for the teaching objectives.They explain picture and text modalities or audio and video modalities in the PPT courseware with verbal language,along with body language to interact with students to achieve a highly-efficient class.3.There exist three similarities in the use of multimodal teaching: the flexible combination of multimodality,exquisite PPT courseware design,and the active interactions between teachers and students.4.They also have different features in the multimodality combination.Some teachers tend to use more text and picture modalities while others favor audio or video modalities.The differences are demonstrated in the use of body language and multimodality choice of four teachers.Through the above comparison of modality combination and interactions between teachers and students of the four classes,the study comes to the conclusion that the application of multimodality teaching helps improve the college teaching to achieve a highly-effective class.It is also beneficial for motivating students to take an active part in the classroom activities and enhance the multiliteracy to meet the need of modern education.