A Study On Application Of Multimodal Discourse Analysis In High School English Listening Comprehension Teaching

Teachers are required to use multimodal teaching tools to promote English listening comprehension proficiency of high school students by the English Language Curriculum Standards for General High Schools(2017 Edition Revised 2020).First,listening comprehension as one of the comprehension skills in language skills,teachers need to guide high school students to understand the speaker’s intention based on the tone and intonation in listening discourse,to understand the meaning expressed by the phenomena of pauses,repetitions,and explanations in discourse,and to understand the meaning presented by non-verbal resources such as colors,sounds,symbols,pictures,and images in multimodal discourse.Second,teachers need to teach language and design instructional activities that promote the development of high school students’ listening comprehension skills by using multimodality as a mode of presentation in oral,written,audio,and video formats.Literature studies have also shown that the use of multimodal resources has a facilitating effect on English listening comprehension among high school students.However,using high school students as the research object and combining Clark&Clark’s listening formation process and listening use process to explore the multimodal listening teaching approach guided by multimodal discourse analysis remain to be tried and verified by scholars.Therefore,this study combines Clark&Clark’s listening comprehension formation process and use process with multimodal discourse analysis in order to meet the requirement of integrating educational technology and curriculum in high school curriculum,which is important for exploring an effective multimodal listening teaching approach in high school English.Based on multimodal discourse analysis and Clark&Clark’s listening comprehension theory,this study intends to conduct an experimental study among a total of 104 high school students in a senior high school in Zhangzhou,Fujian Province,using experimental methodology,interview and comparative method,in an attempt to answer the following three research questions:(1)To what degree does the listening teaching approach guided by multimodal discourse analysis effectively improve students’ listening proficiency?(2)How does this multimodal listening teaching approach affect the listening comprehension of high school students with different listening levels?(3)What are the impacts of the multimodal instructional approach on listening tasks of short conversations and paragraphs?The results of the data analysis show that,first,the listening instructional approach guided by multimodal discourse analysis is beneficial to improve the listening proficiency of high school students.Under the guidance of multimodal discourse analysis,according to the listening formation process and listening using process of Clark&Clark’s listening comprehension,teachers integrat multimodal teaching resources into listening instruction and instruct students to interpret the "Cultural Context" and "Discourse Meaning" constructed by multimodal resources.After identifying the conceptual,interpersonal and discourse meanings of listening speech,intonation,stress and tone,as well as phrases and sentence components,students are guided to identify the specific content and thematic meaning of speech acts and propositions by combining background knowledge and memory retrieval.Second,the multimodal English listening instructional approach promotes listening comprehension of high school students with different listening proficiency,among those with poor listening proficiency who perform particularly well.Compared with traditional teaching methods,the multimodal teaching approach opens up diverse cognitive channels for students with different listening levels and promotes their interpretation of textual meanings constructed by multimodal resources in the process of listening comprehension,thus enhancing listening comprehension.The use of multimodal teaching tools stimulates their intrinsic learning motivation through external motivation and increases their participation in the listening class,resulting in significant improvement in their listening performance.Thirdly,the use of multimodal listening teaching methods helps high school students to listen to short dialogues and passages,and the performance of the passage listening task is more obvious.Unlike conversation listening comprehension,which requires back-and-forth identification of the relationship between the two task roles and the differences in the features and structure of different speakers’ discourse,paragraph listening has less cognitive load in this regard,prompting high school students to understand and identify the propositional and thematic meaning of the passage more quickly.In addition,the two sides of communication in passage listening are the speaker and the high school students themselves,who,as listeners,directly participate in the communication and interaction of the passage,allowing them to gain a sense of authenticity and participation to achieve a correct understanding of the meaning of the discourse.According to the above findings,the author proposes the following teaching suggestions:First,teachers are required to change the way of teaching listening to widen the perceptual channel of listening comprehension for high school students.Second,they are expected to attach importance to the cultural and situational construction to enhance students’ listening genre awareness.Third,they are supposed to develop diversified meaning-making multimodal resources for students with different English listening proficiency.