An Experimental Study On Teaching Of English Writing In Senior High Schools From The Multimodal Perspective

In recent years,the cultivation of English key competences has been carried out in basic education throughout the country,as well as the reform of the twice-a-year test of English college entrance examination and the update of textbooks,all of which state the importance of cultivating learners' comprehensive development and critical thinking.These put forward new challenges and higher requirements for English learners' ability of writing and thinking.Since the early 21 st century,multimodality,as a new educational idea,has been widely used in vocabulary and reading teaching.However,few pieces of research were done on English writing teaching,and domestic and foreign related studies mostly focused on the qualitative analysis.Therefore,combining theory with writing teaching practice,this paper tries to explore the effectiveness of multimodality in English writing teaching through the classroom teaching experiment.Based on multimodality,the study carries out the writing teaching experiment in Yu Du No.2 Middle School to find out following research questions.First of all,can multimodal teaching improve high school students' English writing ability and what aspects does it reflect? Second,what are the differences between traditional teaching method and multimodal teaching method on students' English writing? And then what are the teachers' and students' attitudes towards multimodal writing teaching? Before the experiment,questionnaires were issued to probe into the status of writing teaching in the experimental school and screened out the research subjects with considerable writing scores.Class 3 and Class 19 of senior grade one were regarded as control classes using the way of “chalks plus blackboard”,while Class 4and Class 20 were experimental classes taking the multimodal writing teaching method;Supplemented by classroom observation,the teaching experiment lasted 16 weeks,whose data were cross-analyzed by software SPSS 24.0;After the experiment,interviews were conducted to collect teachers' views or suggestions on multimodal writing teaching and provide implications for multimodal English writing.The results of the study showed that:(1)Multimodal writing teaching methodcan improve students' writing performance effectively,including the aspects of vocabulary,lexical chunks and the logical thinking of writings;(2)Traditional and multimodal writing teaching have a significant difference in students' English writing.In terms of textual structure,students' ability to organize discourses is stronger under the method of multimodal writing,while with the cohesive devices and sentence patterns,the effect of traditional writing teaching is better for students' learning;(3)Both teachers and students hold a positive attitude towards multimodal writing teaching.It not only creates a good classroom atmosphere for teachers' teaching activities,but also stimulates students' writing desire.Based on the above conclusions,the author put forward the following suggestions for English educators: improving teachers' information literacy;cultivating learners' multiliteracies;avoiding the“formalizing” classroom of multimodal writing and combining traditional writing with multimodal writing teaching methods.