A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Teachers’ Discourse In Primary School High-quality English Classes

In the era of rapid development of information technology,pure verbal modality can no longer meet people‘s communication needs.Multimodal communication comes into being.In the classroom,a place full of interpersonal communication,changes are also quietly taking place: the original classroom model is gradually eliminated by the times,and multimodal class teaching has gradually become the norm in the classroom.In the 1970 s,western countries took the lead in the study of multimodal discourse analysis theory.It was not until the beginning of this century that multi-modality attracted the attention of domestic scholars.After years of development,in recent years,the theory of multimodal discourse analysis has been widely used in domestic classroom teaching research.Nevertheless,up to now,researchers mainly study classes in universities,high schools,and middle schools.There is very little research on primary school classes.Based on the theory of systemic functional linguistics and visual grammar,with the comprehensive theoretical framework of multimodal discourse analysis constructed by Zhang Delu for research framework,this research selects three high-quality classes from the Ninth Primary School English Classroom Teaching Observation and Training Conference.It makes a multimodal study of teachers‘ classroom discourse with the help of the multimodal analysis software ELAN.This paper mainly studies primary school high-quality English classes from three aspects: What are the usage characteristics of modalities in teachers‘ classroom discourse? What are the distribution characteristics of modalities in each teaching stage? How do teachers use different modalities in classroom teaching to realize the representational meaning,interactive meaning,and compositional meaning?Through data statistics and result analysis,the research found that: 1.All three teachers use rich modalities in classroom teaching.In addition to the traditional verbal modality,many non-verbal modalities such as gesture,posture,and proxemics were also used.Throughout the usage of various modalities,speech,intonation,gaze,proxemics,and other modalities are more used,while writing,facial expression,posture etc.,are relatively less used.2.The modal distribution is proportional to the length of the teaching stage.The longer the teaching time is,the more modalities are distributed in this stage.In addition,the distribution of each modality is different in the same teaching stage.Modalities such as speech,gaze,and gesture are more densely distributed,while some other modalities such as facial expression and posture are relatively sparsely distributed or even not distributed.The distribution of the same modality is different in each teaching stage as well.Most of the modalities are distributed in each stage.However,a small number of modalities are unevenly distributed in different teaching stages.3.In the high-quality primary school English classes,teachers mainly use the modalities of speech,gesture,gaze,and PPT to achieve representational meaning,interactive meaning,and compositional meaning.Based on the research findings,the researcher has gained some implications for English teaching in primary school: 1.Primary school English teachers should strengthen their own theoretical learning literacy and go deeper into multimodal discourse analysis theory research.2.Primary school English teachers should strengthen their own practical ability and strive to integrate theoretical research results into classroom practice.3.Primary school English class needs to be interesting.Teachers should comprehensively use multiple modalities for teaching in their classroom to avoid the simplification of modalities.4.The attention span of primary school students is short,so teachers should reasonably plan the classroom teaching stages and scientifically distribute the modalities.5.Primary school English teachers should make full use of various modality resources to realize the representational meaning,interactive meaning,and compositional meaning in the teaching process.Besides,the researcher also analyzed the shortcomings of this research at the end of the paper,hoping to make up for it in future research.