On Teachers’ Multimodal Discourse In High-quality "Comprehensive English" Classroom Teaching

The application of Information & Communication Technology(ICT)in teaching makes teachers’ classroom discourse apparently multimodal,which provides a new angle for classroom teaching investigations.In most college English classroom teaching studies,attention has been paid to teaching mode,teaching effectiveness and instructional design.However,the multimodality of teachers’ classroom discourse remains to be further investigated.Based on Multimodal Discourse Analysis(MDA),this thesis aims to explore the employment of multimodality in “Comprehensive English” classroom teaching by revolving around three concerns:(i)the schematic structure of “Comprehensive English” classroom teaching;(ii)the distribution and functions of key modes employed by teachers;(iii)the modality cooperation presented in the schematic structure of “Comprehensive English” classroom teaching.In this thesis,MDA based on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics and Zhang’s synthetic theoretical framework for MDA are considered as the theoretical and analytical bases.Quantitative and qualitative methods are adopted to analyze the top ten prize-winner teachers’ teaching videos and corresponding PPT courseware in the 4th SFLEP National Foreign Language Teaching Contest(NFLTC)with the help of multimedia annotation tool ELAN.The study presents several findings.First,the schematic structure of“Comprehensive English” classroom teaching can be divided into seven teaching phases: Greeting and Beginning(GB),Lead-in(LI),Teaching Objectives and Procedures(OP),Text Study(TS),Theme-related Activities(TA),Summary and Assignment(SA)and End(EN).Second,in teachers’ verbal modality,intonation is most frequently adopted as a supplementary means to teachers’ spoken language.In teachers’ body modality,gaze and gesture are employed more often than other types.Gaze is mainly activated to acquire and spread information,attract students’ attention and provide psychological support.Gesture plays an essential role in illustrating the difficult points and marking the critical features.In teachers’ PPT courseware modality,the text & image,text,chart,embedded video and image are employed to highlight and extend teachers’ spoken language.To conclude,both verbal and non-verbal modes bear significance during the instruction.Third,except the TA phase,the auditory modality of teachers’ spoken language dominates the whole teaching process.When conducting teaching,teachers usually adopt different combinations of modes to emphasize the teaching focus.In this study,the modality cooperation between teachers’ body actions and spoken language is primarily presented as the reinforcement of complementary relation,while the cooperation between teachers’ PPT courseware and spoken language is mainly displayed as the overlapping or inclusion of non-complementary relation and reinforcement of complementary relation.Implications for teachers’ multimodal teaching are provided in this thesis:Firstly,teachers should take active actions to cultivate students’ multimodal literacy by applying multimodal resources during the instruction.Secondly,to optimize the teaching effect,teachers should pay attention to non-verbal modes and flexibly employ them in teaching.Thirdly,teachers are encouraged to grasp the relationships between different modalities and apply them in an appropriate manner.Finally,teachers should follow certain principles of modality selection so as to maximize the effect of mode combination.