Research On The Instruction Of Viewing In Senior High School English Teaching

With the development of information technology,language medium is gradually replaced by complex media composed of language,image,sound,etc.In the context of new media era,multimodality has become the basic feature of modern discourses.Commonly along with the written words are graphs,tables,videos,animation or some other symbols.Thus,the ability of interpreting images has become one of the key literacies of modern citizens and then the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China puts forward the new requirement of the instruction of viewing,according to the document of English Curriculum Standard of Senior High School(2017 Edition).At present,both the definition and theoretical system of viewing are not clear.Relevant researches findlings are limited and it remains unknown on teachers'understanding of,attitude towards and instruction of viewing in senior high English class.In addition,the implementation of viewing is also an urgent problem to be solved.Therefore,it is of great theoretical and practical significance to reseach on teachers'instruction of viewing.In this study,literature review,questionnaire,classroom observation and interview are all used to investigate teachers' instruction of viewing in senior high school English teaching.After defining the core concepts after combing relevant literatures at home and abroad,the author constructs a framework of teaching viewing,including the use of visual texts,the cultivation of viewing attitudes and the development of viewing skills of different cognitive levels.Based on all these,research tools are designed including the questionnnare,observation form,and inerveiw outline.Eventually,110 senior high school English teachers in Shanghai were surveyed.There are four main findings.(1)Teachers have different understanding of the concept of viewing.(2)Teachers have a low sense of responsiblility for teaching viewing.(3)Teachers'instruction of viewing is not ideal.(4)The lack of training,teaching materaicls and evaluation are the three main causes for the undesired situation mentioned above.More details about the third finding are as follow.1)In the use of visual texts,teachers have used a variety of visual texts,such as typographical features,charts,pictures and videos,but with low frequency of using.Beides,they use visual texts in various teaching scenarios except writing,indicating that teachers neglect the integration of viewing and writing.2)As for viewing attitudes,teachers fail to effectively guide students to view with a purpose or active thinking,for example,with a question in mind or take notes while viewing.3)In terms of viewing skills,the overall frequency of teaching is low but relatively teahcers tend to cultivate recognizing and understanding skills more.Besides,the practice of all the four cognitive viewing skills are limited in different ways:teachers pay less attention to the recognizing and understanding of typographical features and charts;the analyzing skill is usually used to infer the objective facts instead of the implied meanings and the evaluating skill is usually practiced to give personal comments on the content.In addition,the four skills refer to different visual texts:recognizing skill mainly refers to the typographical features and pictures;understanding skill the pictures and videos;analyzing skill the pictures and evaluating skill the videos.Based on all these findings,suggestions are put forward from five aspects:research development,theoretical training,teaching evaluation,teaching resources and teaching strategies to promote teachers' instruction of viewing.