An Empirical Study Of The Impact Of Extracurricular Multimodal English Materials On The Reading Achievements Of Primary School Students In Shanghai

Reading is not only one of the four basic skills of language learning,but also an important part of language teaching.With the prevalence of English curriculum standards in primary schools,the teaching of English reading in primary schools has been paid more and more attention to.However,the teaching of English reading in primary schools is still facing a great challenge because of a series of problems,such as large class size,limited class hours and inadequate English reading materials.Considering their popularity and advantages,researchers(Sipe,2008;Sipe &Brightman,2009;Wu,2014)have studied the impact of picture books on students' reading comprehension and proved their effectiveness.But good picture books are still hard to come by.And passages are the most common reading materials for students.Therefore,the author makes an attempt to figure out the impact of multimodal passages on students' performance on reading,as multimodal passages,shortened in length,bear striking similarities to picture booksBased on the visual grammar and image-text relations,the study conducts an experiment as well as an interview to explore the effect of multimodal printed English materials on students' reading achievements.When having informal talks with participants,the author finds that students' sensitivity to different image-text relations are different.Then two of the most common image-text relations are employed to check students' performance.The participants are 50 fourth and fifth graders mainly enrolled in schools in Pudong and Minhang districts and they are taking the New Concept English course in different classes at Only Education.In the placement test,there is no significant difference in their language proficiency.And each participant is required to finish four tests of similar difficulty,and two of the tests are adopted to test the effect of multimodal materials versus monomodal materials on reading comprehension while the other two are used to test the effects of different image-text relations.Throughdata analysis and feedback from participants,the results show that multimodal characteristics play a role in improving student's reading comprehension while the enhancing image-text relation does not significantly help fourth and fifth graders to perform better in reading.