A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Junior High School English Listening And Speaking Demonstration Class

With the rapid development of modern science and technology,pictures,videos,music,and other symbolic resources are being widely utilized in communication.Language is no longer the only element to express meaning in communication,but other semiotic resources have been taken into consideration.Multimodality has gradually attracted people’s attention in communication.Thus,multimodal discourse analysis has emerged.Multimodal discourse analysis not only focuses on static discourse,such as newspapers,advertisements,cartoons,etc.,but also pays attention to dynamic discourse,such as film,conference,and speech.Based on the previous researches on dynamic discourse and the application of multimedia in teaching,this thesis attempts to conduct multimodal discourse analysis of junior high school English listening and speaking demonstration class.This thesis analyzes seven English listening and speaking classes of the 12^th Session of National Junior High School English Demonstration Class under the guidance of Halliday’s SFG theory,especially,social semiotics and meta-functional theories,and Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen’s VG.It mainly studies the following three questions:1.What are the structural features in junior high school English listening and speaking demonstration class?2.What is the distribution of different modalities in junior high school English listening and speaking demonstration class?3.How do various modalities interact and cooperate with each other to realize representational,interactive,and compositional meaning?The quantitative and qualitative analysis are mainly adopted to analyze research subjects in this thesis.Semiotic resources in seven junior high school English listening and speaking demonstration classes are annotated with the help of the multimodal annotation tool ELAN.Data are collected and organized by Excel to objectively answer the research questions.The research results are as follows.1.Junior high school English listening and speaking demonstration class is multimodal dynamic discourse.Spoken language,gestures,gaze,facial expression,and PPT content are fully utilized in teaching.Junior high school English listening and speaking demonstration class is divided into six teaching stages:Class Beginning→Lead-in→Listening Comprehension→Oral Practice→Summary and Assignment→The Ending.The types of modalities are abundant in LC stage and OP stage,while LI stage and SA stage involve relatively fewer modal types.2.Spoken language runs through the whole teaching process.Intonation is used to reinforce the spoken language.Falling-tone is the most frequency used.Next comes rising-tone,rising-falling as well as falling-rising respectively.It is very common to employ beat gestures and deictic gestures to emphasize important information and attract students’attention,while iconic gestures and metaphor gestures are used to explain abstract concepts.The visual text,image and text,embedded video and single image are contained in the PPT courseware,which are crucial to promote the teaching content.Image and text are used frequently,and embedded video as listening material is important for English listening and speaking class.3.The collocation of various modes realizes three meanings,namely,representational,interactive,and compositional meaning.Deictic gestures and eyesight produce vectors to realize representational meaning in narrative process.Interactive meaning is achieved by contact,social distance,and perspective,employing eyesight,the change of distance and PPT slides.The compositional meaning is realized through information value,salience,and frame of elements in PPT courseware.To sum up,this study draws the following conclusions:1.The application of semiotic resources runs through the whole teaching process.The usage of frequency and types of semiotic resources are closely related to the design of teaching activities.2.The selection of semiotic resources relies on the actual teaching situation,because the same mode may have different functions in different teaching stages.3.To realize teachers’discourse,several different semiotic resources are cooperated with each other to convey representational meaning,interactive meaning and compositional meaning.