A Study On Ideational Meanings Constructed In Senior High School English Teacher’s Multimodal Talk

Classroom teaching is,in essence,a process in which multiple semiotic resources jointly construct an overall meaning.The emphasis on the linguistic aspect alone of pedagogical discourse,undoubtedly fails to comprehensively interpret the meanings conveyed by multimodal messages.In recent years,research on multimodal pedagogical discourse has grown dramatically.But most researchers focus on modern multimedia technology,especially interactive whiteboards and slideshows,while teacher’s multimodal talk is ignored to a large extent.Additionally,most research adopts the approach of qualitative analysis.Although some studies employ the means of quantitative statistics,the quantification is mainly reflected in the statistics of the structural distribution of various modalities on different teaching stages with a small corpus of one to three teaching videos.Notably,while analyzing the metafunctional instantiation of multimodal pedagogical discourse,almost all studies tend to choose only one episode with short duration from each teaching video for the illustration of each metafunction,which makes the analysis highly subjective and fails to show how the teacher’s selections and deployment of semiotic resources constructs unique pedagogical style on the whole.Thus,this study takes a mixed approach of qualitative analysis and quantitative statistics to explore the ideational function instantiated in multimodal teacher’s talk as well as the synergy between modes to construct an overall meaning and the embodied unique pedagogical style,based on our investigated senior high school English teaching video.First,situated within systemic functional(SF)theory,this thesis attempts to construct an overall framework to analyze the ideational function instantiated in multimodal teacher’s talk,which clearly presents how the teacher’s speech,gesture and use of classroom zone construct ideational meanings.Specifically,this thesis directly applies systemic functional theory to the analysis of pedagogical speech,which is known as systemic functional linguistics.According to Halliday(1994),the ideational meaning of language is mainly instantiated in its transitivity system,where the transitivity process is centered.Thus,the research focus of pedagogical speech in classroom teaching is mainly on the analysis of its transitivity process.As for gestural analysis,this thesis combines Martinec’s(2001)and adaptive Cléirigh’s(2011)classifications of gesture together.Martinec’s(2001)classification of actions is conducted according to their realizations of three metafunctional meanings,while Cléirigh’s(2011)classification of gesture is based on the relation to language.This combination allows us to establish a sub-framework for a more thorough and comprehensive gestural analysis.Additionally,this thesis also creatively proposes four types of classroom zones based on the assumption that there exist regularized patterns about the semantic meanings of face-to-face classroom zones which are realized by various teaching steps conducted on them over time.After that,this thesis sees the investigated multimodal teaching video as a video stream consisting of 2483 key frames by selecting one key frame within per second.Then,guided by the constructed analytical framework,this study extensively analyzes and annotates many parameters including the ideational meanings constructed by multimodal teacher’s talk in each key frame.Through that,we collect data reflecting the ideational meanings of multimodal teacher’s talk comprehensively rather than partially.Finally,with quantitative statistics and analysis of the annotation results,this thesis concludes that: 1)even in foreign language teaching classrooms,non-verbal modalities(gesture and the use of classroom zone in this study)still play far more than auxiliary roles,but an integral part of the overall meaning making;2)three types of semantic relationships realized through the interaction between semiotic resources of speech,gesture and zone are identified in our investigated data: ideational concurrence,ideational complementarity and ideational contradiction;3)the synergy between three semiotic resources creates an authoritative classroom learning and teaching experience.In addition,the teacher’s selection and deployment of semiotic resources are not all intentional,but often impromptu and subconscious,which causes occasional meaning contradictions between concurrent modalities.Thus,this study calls all teachers to build an awareness that the classroom teaching and learning experience is constructed through the cooperation between multimodal semiotic resources.Only with such an awareness,is it possible for teachers to intentionally select and deploy various modalities to realize an expected pedagogical effect.