An Empirical Study Of Junior Middle School English Vocabulary Teaching Based On Multimodal Theory

Vocabulary is a basic element in the process of learning English.For junior middle school students,vocabulary learning has particularly importance for the reason that National English Curriculum Standards of Compulsory Education(2011)makes it compulsory for them to master about 1600 words and 200 to 300 phrases and collocations.Requirements in the English curriculum enlighten English teachers to think how to make English vocabulary teaching more attractive and efficient.The author of this thesis intends to construct a multimodal English vocabulary teaching mode and verifies the effect of this teaching mode in vocabulary teaching through this research.This study aims to solve the following problems:(1)What kind of teaching coursewares based on Multimodal Theory are qualified for junior middle school vocabulary teaching?(2)What’s the effect of multimodal vocabulary teaching on improving students’ English vocabulary acquisition?(3)What are the problems in the application of multimodal vocabulary teaching method?The research tools of this study include tests,teaching experiment,interview and questionnaire.The experimental subjects were 40 students from Class 2,Grade 7,who studied in a rural junior middle school.Before this study,the students were pretested with pre-test paper,then after 12 weeks of multimodal vocabulary teaching experiment,they were tested with post-test paper.Besides two tests,students were required to complete a questionnaire and they were interviewed afterwards.After the experiment,the author analyzed the tests data through SPSS 26.0.After the study,major findings are found as follows:(1)Multimodal English vocabulary teaching class was conducted with the help of multimodal teaching coursewares which are designed with multimodal symbol resources.In the multimodal teaching coursewares,the key and outstanding knowledge points are enhanced by using images,audio,video or other modes in the coursewares and choosing the right font and font size,the important knowledge points are highlighted properly.At the same time,oral language and different body modes,such as gestures,body movements,expressions,etc.are selected in the coursewares.(2)After the experiment,data collection and analysis are conducted.The mean gap between pre-test scores and post-test scores is 4.567.This result means that students’ scores of vocabulary tests have improved a lot after the experiment.It can be said that students’ English vocabulary acquisition improved.Through analyzing and comparing the two tests with SPSS 26.0,the author got the following data,t =-11.209,p= 0.000,from which it can be drawn a conclusion that there was a great difference between the two tests.It’s verified that a significant difference occurs between the two tests and it has a good effect to improve students’ English vocabulary acquisition by applying multimodal vocabulary teaching.(3)Some problems emerged in the application of multimodal vocabulary teaching mode.Most of the students give a high evaluation of multimodal vocabulary teaching mode,but 27.5% of the students express their preference for traditional vocabulary teaching method for the following reasons.With traditional vocabulary teaching method,important knowledge points are written on the blackboard,which can be kept for a relatively long time for them to take notes.These students think that blackboard writing is more convenient for taking notes and after-class revision under the traditional vocabulary teaching method.Meanwhile,another problem is that teachers need to have competence to arrange the content of multimodal coursewares reasonably,so as to reduce the distraction of irrelevant information to students’ attention.All in all,this study aims to explore the method of English vocabulary teaching which is based on Multimodal Theory in junior middle school.It tries to provide some practical guidance to the current vocabulary teaching in junior middle school.Hence,the study of vocabulary teaching in junior middle school has deeper significance so as to throw light on English vocabulary teaching and learning.