Exploring Multimodal English Writing Teaching In Junior High Schools

English writing is one of the most important language skills that should be mastered by all Chinese students.However,it's not easy to master writing for English learners,especially for junior high school students who are at the beginning stage of learning English.With the progress of information technology and the requirements for the reform of English Teaching,multimodality has become a hot topic for linguists and educational experts in recent years.We live in a multimodal world,using various symbolic resources to accomplish meaning representation and communication.Teachers need to combine language with sounds,images,gestures,facial expressions and media to form a real context for students.The rapid development of network information technology not only provides a more convenient way for teachers to obtain teaching resources,but also provides a new opportunity for teachers to carry out multimodal teaching.By introducing multimodal discourse theory to English writing teaching,this study intends to explore the following two questions:1.What are the effects of applying multimodality to English writing teaching?2.How can we design effective multimodal classes to improve students' English writing ability in junior high schools?The author conducted the study from September to November in 2017 in a junior high school in Nanhai District,Foshan.The subjects were 99 students in two parallel classes in the second grade.One class was randomly selected as the experimental group(EG)and the other class as the control group(CG).The EG received multimodal writing teaching while CG carried out the traditional approach.The research tools include interviews,questionnaires and writing tests.At the beginning of the semester,a pre-test was conducted to test students' writing ability.After the experiment,three post-tests were conducted to test the effect of the multimodal teaching.Interviews and questionnaires are used to find out the participants' attitudes towards multimodal teaching and their interest in writing.All data were analyzed by SPSS and Excel.The experimental results shows that,in the eighth week of the experiment,the average score of the EG students is 10.735 points.Compared with the first test,the score increased by0.347 points,and the effect of the experiment was obvious.The average scores of EG and CG are higher than those in the pre-test.The EG increased by 1.865 points,and the CG increased by 0.65 points.Since the average scores of the two classes are very close,it can be seen that the progress of the EG is great.In addition,with the results of interviews and questionnaires,the author finally draws the following conclusion: applying multimodality to writing teaching can fully mobilize students' mutual cooperation among different sense channels,and attract students' attention.By improving students' comprehensible input,the teacher can raise the students' writing interest and divergent thinking ability,and hence improve their writing ability.