An Empirical Study Of Multimodal English Vocabulary Teaching In Junior High School

As one of the three elements of language learning(pronunciation,vocabulary and grammar),vocabulary is an indispensable part of language acquisition system.As a result,vocabulary teaching has been paid much attention by foreign language teachers.They try to combine different teaching methods with vocabulary teaching.In recent years,multimodal vocabulary teaching has attracted more and more attention.In the 1990 s,the theoretical study of multimodal discourse has been springing up abroad and at home.Multimodal discourse analysis emphasizes multi-channel and multi-sensory stimulation to mobilize learners' initiative in language learning,which conforms to the law of language learning.In recent years,the rapid development of information technology provides a technical basis for the popularization of multimodal teaching.In this study,multimodal theory is applied to junior high school English vocabulary teaching through empirical research.It mainly studies the following questions:1)Whether multimodal vocabulary teaching can enlarge the breadth of vocabulary knowledge of junior high school better than traditional vocabulary teaching?2)Whether multimodal vocabulary teaching can deepen the depth of vocabulary knowledge of junior high school better than traditional vocabulary teaching?3)What is students' attitude towards multimodal vocabulary teaching?This study lasted for three months.The author used the vocabulary breadth scale,vocabulary depth scale and questionnaire as the research tools,and selected class 3and class 4 of junior grade one of a middle school in Hengyang City as the research objects.Class 3 is the experimental class,which adopted multimodal vocabulary teaching mode.Class 4 is the control class,which adopted traditional vocabulary teaching mode.Before the experiment,A pretest paper was used to test breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge of the two classes' students.The results show that the two classes are at the similar level on the breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge before the experiment.After the teaching experiment,the students of the two classes took a post test of vocabulary breadth and depth respectively.The pretest paper andpost-test paper are of similar difficulty.The results of the pretest and post test of the two classes are compared to test whether multimodal vocabulary teaching mode can improve breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge better than traditional vocabulary teaching mode.After the experiment,an questionnaire was filled out by the experimental class students to investigate their attitudes towards multimodal vocabulary teaching mode.The questionnaire was revised according to “An Empirical Study of Multimodal Teaching on the Acquisition of English Vocabulary(Gan,2012)”,which has been proved of good reliability and validity.The author applied SPSS statistical software to analyze the experimental data.The results show that: multimodal vocabulary teaching can enlarge the breadth of vocabulary knowledge and deepen the depth of vocabulary knowledge of junior high school better than traditional vocabulary teaching,and multimodal vocabulary teaching mode has incomparable advantages in stimulating students' interests in learning and consolidating the lexical applying ability.This study is conducive to promoting the diversification of junior high school English teachers' vocabulary teaching and to solving the problem of students' vocabulary memory learning to a certain extent.