Effects Of Multimodal Vocabulary Teaching On Junior Middle School Students’ English Vocabulary Memory

Multimodal discourse analysis is the theoretical basis of multimodal vocabulary teaching.Multimodal vocabulary teaching refers to the use of visual,auditory,kinesthetic,tactile and olfactory senses through pictures,videos,English songs,role-play and other teaching activities to understand and memorize vocabulary.For the past few years,multimodal vocabulary teaching has aroused the interest of researchers and teachers in China.But,to date,few studies have been conducted on the junior middle school students relating to multimodal vocabulary teaching.The present study tried to explore the effects of multimodal vocabulary teaching on junior middle school students,and investigated its effects on high-scoring students,low-scoring students and vocabulary memory strategies,which aimed at finding better solutions to English vocabulary teaching for junior middle school students.Three research questions are listed below:1.What effect does multimodal vocabulary teaching have on English vocabulary memory of junior middle school students?2.What effect does multimodal vocabulary teaching have on English vocabulary memory of high-scoring and low-scoring students?3.Can multimodal vocabulary teaching develop junior middle school students’ English vocabulary memory strategies?In order to answer the above three questions,100 new students of two parallel classes in one junior middle school were selected to carry out a 6-week experiment.50 students were assigned to the experimental class(EC)with a multimodal vocabulary teaching method,while the other 50 in controlled class(CC)were taught by the traditional vocabulary teaching method.Using the instruments of vocabulary memory test papers,a questionnaire of vocabulary memory strategies and attitudes towards multimodal vocabulary teaching and an interview,the experiment revealed the following findings:Firstly,multimodal vocabulary teaching bore advantages over the traditional one in terms of vocabulary memory of junior middle school students.There existed a significant difference in the grades of students between EC and CC in the last test.And,students of EC outperformed those of CC to a significant degree.Also there was a significant difference between the first and the last tests in the EC.EC did better in the last test than the first test.The use of multimodal vocabulary teaching activities attracted students’ attention and activated students’ visual,auditory.kinesthetic,tactile and olfactory senses to understand the meaning of words and memorize the target words.What’s more,multimodal vocabulary teaching adopted various tasks such as learning English songs,role-play and group discussion,which helped create a better language learning environment,compared with the traditional sentence translation teaching.Lastly,a majority of students held positive attitudes towards multimodal vocabulary teaching and thought that multimodal vocabulary teaching could improve vocabulary memory.Secondly,multimodal vocabulary teaching was more beneficial to the low-scoring students than high-scoring students with regard to vocabulary memory.There was a significant difference between the first and the last tests of low-scoring students,but the difference of high-scoring students was not obvious.For the low-scoring students,colorful pictures,audios and videos increased their interest in participating in the classroom activities,and the efficiency of low-scoring students’ vocabulary memory was significantly increased.However,for the high-scoring students,the multimodal vocabulary teaching did not have a prominent effect on them.Because of their high learning level,they did not spend too much time understanding and memorizing words by different kinds of teaching activities.Last but not least,multimodal vocabulary teaching could develop junior middle school students’ vocabulary memory strategies,particularly from rehearsal memory strategies to encoding memory strategies.After the experiment,the number of students who were accustomed to memorizing words only by using word lists,oral repetition and visual repetition decreased gradually.And more students learned to memorize words by imagery,semantic encoding,auditory encoding,visual encoding and association memory strategies indicating that vocabulary memory changed from mechanical and repetitive memory to meaningful and associative memory.Moreover,most students approved that the use of multimodal teaching activities such as role-play,story-telling and group discussion helped them better understand and memorize vocabulary and enhanced interaction between teacher and students.