The Application Of Multiliteracies Pedagogy To Senior High School English Reading Teaching

With the development of the information age and the advance of science and technology,the channels for people to obtain information have become more and more diversified,and multimodal expression has become a part of life.The development of education technology has changed the traditional ways of literacies.In 1996,the New London Group came up with the Multiliteracies Pedagogy,which broke through the original language-centered teaching approaches and focused on the use of various expressive resources to help students understand reading information.Based on the theory of Social Semiotics and the theory of Design Learning,this study adopts the New London Group’s Multiliteracies Pedagogy to improve senior high school students’ multiliteracies in English reading so as to improve their reading comprehension,and eventually meets the requirements of “reading” and “viewing”,which are required by The English Curriculum Standard of Senior High School.At present,most of the English teachers have been based on single language-literacy to practice reading teaching.In order to improve the situation,the author,according to the Multiliteracies Pedagogy,attempts to apply the four steps of Overt Instruction,Situated Practice,Critical Framing and Transformed Practice to an experimental study in senior high school English reading class.The following two hypotheses put forward in the thesis are as follows: 1.In senior high school English reading class,the application of Multiliteracies Pedagogy proposed by the New London Group can foster students’ four kinds of Multiliteracies,namely,the ability to understand reading resources,the ability to retrieve reading materials,the ability to formulate learning plans and the ability to learn cooperatively.2.In the process of cultivating the Multiliteracies,students’ reading comprehension can be improved to some extent.Taking 101 students who are from two parallel classes in Grade one of a school in Zhangzhou as the research objects,the author used the methods of the literature research,questionnaire survey method,experimental method and so on to compared the traditional English reading class with the experimental one which practiced Multiliteracies Pedagogy in order to explore the influence of the MultiliteraciesPedagogy on the improvement of multiliteracy among senior high school students.The experiment lasted one semester.It’s found that: 1.In the questionnaire post-test aimed to survey four multiliteracies(the ability to understand reading resources,the ability to retrieve reading materials,the ability to formulate learning plans and the ability to keep cooperative learning),the average value of the experimental class held higher than that of the control class,and the average value of the post-test in the experimental class stayed higher than those of its pre-test.However,the average value of the questionnaire survey showed the differences among four multiliteracies.The ability to understand reading resources was improved the most,followed by the ability to formulate learning plans,the ability to retrieve reading materials and the cooperative learning ability improved the least.Therefore,it’s suggested that the Multiliteracies Pedagogy has a positive effect on these four kinds of multiliteracy abilities.Compared the results of the reading tests between the control class and the experimental class,the post-test results showed that the reading scores of the experimental class were higher than that of the control class.Moreover,the experimental class’ s post-test results were significantly higher than that of its pre-test.Thus,it can be seen that the Multiliteracies Pedagogy can promote the reading comprehension of high school students in some degree.Based on the above research findings,this paper puts forward some suggestions on English reading teaching in senior high schools,aiming to explore an effective multi-literacy cultivation and provide reference for front-line teachers.