A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of MOOCs:Academic Communication In English

Former research on classroom discourse mainly centered on teachers’ verbal language or the interaction between teachers and students.However,due to the relentless pace of developments in information technology,text and images are increasingly coming together,creating multimodal texts.Against this backdrop,multimodal discourse analysis comes into being.Then people are increasingly aware that other non-verbal modes such as gestures,gazes,and facial expressions also play an important role in teaching and therefore,many multimodal discourse analysis of classroom discourse have been carried out.But it is worth noting that with the development of information technology also comes distance education,which is symbolized by the emergence of massive open online courses(MOOCs).MOOCs are rich in multimedia materials including texts,pictures,tables,audio stream,video stream,and cartoons.MOOCs,flexibly employing more modes than traditional classroom teaching,provide a new way of teaching and learning and have become an inevitable trend.However,in spite of the importance and attention attached to the functions of different modes in traditional classroom teaching,few studies about the emerging MOOCs from the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis have been done.Through the multimodal discourse analysis of a typical academic communication English MOOC form the platform of Chinese University MOOCs,this thesis tries to address the following questions:(1)What are the distribution features of modes in Academic Communication English MOOCs?(2)How do different modes in Academic Communication English MOOCs achieve meaning construction?(3)What are the relations between teachers’ spoken language and visual modes? To answer the three questions,a new model based on Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual grammar and Martinec and Salway’s image-text relations framework is proposed for the analysis.Through a systematic analysis,the main conclusions are as follows.(1)Auditory modes are frequently combined with visual modes to convey meaning and different modes are more prefer in different teaching phases.(2)Different modes work with teachers’ spoken language to successfully co-construct representational,interactive and textual meanings.Therefore,Visual Grammar is applicable in the analysis of visual modes’ meaning construction.(3)To explain the relations between different modes in MOOCs,some multiple relations such as elaboration based on extension,elaboration based on enhancement and enhancement based on elaboration should be added to the former framework of image-text relations which only includes the relations of elaboration,extension and enhancement.This thesis enriches and develops the theory of multimodal discourse analysis and is innovative in the research subject and methodology.Besides,the research results are also meaningful for the design of language MOOCs and multimodal teaching both in English MOOCs and traditional English teaching.