An Action Research On English Writing Teaching In Junior High School From The Perspective Of Multimodality Theory

As one of the basic skills that students need to master,English writing is an important way for students to use the language to express and communicate.Students in junior high school have the cognitive characteristics of imagery thinking,and their fatigue cognition in single mode increases dramatically over unit time,which poses certain challenges to writing lessons.English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education(2022 edition)clearly states that English teaching should not only focus on the quality of content,but also on students’ emotional attitudes.In other words,it is crucial for the teacher to attach importance to the various uses and reasonable collocation of various modes in the cognitive process of students,so as to avoid the cognitive fatigue caused by a single mode,which may lead to students’ weariness of learning.Multimodal writing instruction integrates sound,image,word,body and space arrangement,which can cultivate students’ interest in exploring the writing expression in thematic meanings with the support of scaffolding.For another,multimodal writing instruction helps students establish the relationship between knowledge and promote their language output.On this basis,the author specifically investigates the following two problems under the guidance of systemic functional linguistics and scaffolding theory:(1)Can multimodal writing teaching effectively promote students’ English writing ability in junior high school?(2)How do the teachers apply multimodality to English writing teaching in junior high school?The author conducted a semester-long action research in J Middle School,XX City Guangdong Province.The action research involved students from Class 15,Grade 9.The teaching materials were the first volume of New Standard English for Grade 9 of Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press,and a total of three rounds of teaching actions were conducted.The details were as follows: firstly,before the action research,the author identified the students’ current English writing problems through the pre-test,the questionnaire,and the interview.Next,the first-round action was implemented in weeks 4 to 6 with the teaching design of multimodal English writing.Secondly,after the end of the first-round of action,the empirical data from questionnaires and interviews were collected and analyzed for improving the action plan and adjusting the teaching design of the second-round in timely,which was carried out in weeks 9 to 11.Thirdly,after the second-round of action research,questionnaires and interviews were employed to understand the participants’ attitudes towards English writing and views about the multimodal English writing class,and then reflected on their suggestions and revised the teaching design for the third-round,which was launched from week 14 to week17.Fourthly,at the end of the third-round of action,the author administered two tests,four questionnaires and four interviews to the students,and further collected,analyzed and summarized the data to conclude this research.Data from tests,questionnaires,and interviews were assessed with both qualitative and quantitative analysis,and the findings served as the foundation for better instruction.Descriptive analysis was utilized to identify students’ current attitude towards English writing and their views on English teaching before the action research,and the Paired Sample T-Test in SPSS was employed to compare the changes in the student’s attitude and writing level after the multimodal English writing class.Finally,the data from the three questionnaires and the two tests were compared and analyzed using the One-Way Analysis of Within-Group Variance in SPSS.The results demonstrates that the mean of three questionnaires increases from 24.22 and29.71 to 37.31,and the two rounds of tests grow from an average of 12.02 to 14.71,which reflects that the multimodal English writing teaching method can stimulate students’ various senses to participate in the classroom activities and improve their interest in English expression,thereby promoting their English writing levels.As a result,multimodal English writing classes are conducive to solving the problem of “no interest in writing,difficulty in output” of junior high school students.