Investigating The Effects Of Multimodal Pedagogy On English Major’s Writing Anxiety And Writing Performance

English writing is an essential part of language learning,and it is closely related to students’ ability to use language and logical thinking.The traditional teaching of writing focuses more on the vocabulary,grammar,and structure of students’ writing.This way,teaching neither motivates students to write nor can it adapt to the new teaching environment created by the development of digital technology nowadays.Therefore,exploring more effective teaching methods with the advantage of existing multimodal resources is the key to teaching English.More and more attention has been paid to the effectiveness of multimodal teaching in the English classroom in recent years.A large body of evidence proves that multimodal pedagogy has a positive impact on students’ English learning.However,to date,there has been little discussion about the application of multimodal pedagogy in English writing for English majors.In addition,fewer studies have focused on the effects of multimodal pedagogy on English majors’ second language writing anxiety.The author aims to explore how multimodal pedagogy influences writing anxiety and writing performance.This empirical study examines the effectiveness of applying multimodal pedagogy to the teaching of writing to English majors’ in two natural classes at a university in Northwest China.The author employed a pretest,Second Language Writing Anxiety Inventory(SLWAI),and a posttest.71 English majors participated in the writing tasks,including the pretest,three writing practices,and the posttest.Before the writing instruction,students were required to finish the questionnaire and pretest to examine the initial status quo of students’ writing anxiety and initial writing performance.Then,the teacher randomly divided the two classes into an experimental group and a control group.After three writing instructions,a posttest and a post-questionnaire survey were conducted.The results of the study showed that the multimodal teaching method was effective in reducing students’ second language writing anxiety and improving their writing performance compared to the traditional writing teaching method.Compared with the control group,after three times of multimodal instructional guidance,students in the experimental class showed a significant decrease in writing anxiety and a significant increase in writing performance.A specific analysis of the students’ questionnaires showed that the students’ different anxiety factors in writing anxiety decreased under the multimodal pedagogy.At the same time,there were significant differences in conception anxiety and avoidance behavior.The use of multimodal resources has created a more friendly and relaxed teaching environment,which not only stimulated students’ interest in English writing and reduced their resistance to writing but also developed students’ writing conceptualization skills,exercised their critical thinking,and thus improved their writing performance.The study results confirm that teachers can actively use multimodal approach in English writing instruction and develop an effective teaching method that has positive learning effects.