Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Senior High School English Reading Classes From The Perspective Of Systemic Functional Linguistics

Multimedia technology has made the multimodal characteristics of discourse prominent.Therefore,multimodal discourse analysis(MDA)has gradually become a research field that attracts many researchers.Foreign language classroom teaching,as a typical kind of dynamic multimodal discourse,has received widespread attention from researchers at home and abroad.However,domestic research fruits are currently mainly limited to university English classrooms,and there is less research on MDA in primary and secondary school English classrooms.Therefore,based on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics(SFL),Kress &van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar,and Zhang Delu’s synthetic theoretical framework of MDA,the research referred to Norris’ s nine communicative modes and then integrated a new analytical framework,aiming to explore the use and interaction process of modalities in outstanding high school English classes.In order to achieve this research goal,this study set up the following three research questions: 1.What are the features of outstanding senior high school English reading classes?2.How about the overall usage and distribution features of modes in outstanding senior high school English reading classes? 3.What are the relations between different modalities and how do they interact with each other to achieve the three meta-functions in outstanding senior high school English reading classes? With the aid of multimodal annotation tool – ELAN,this research adopted a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods,analyzing and making annotations of five ministerial-level excellent high school English lessons selected from the National Public Service Platform for Educational Resources.The main findings of this study are as follows: Firstly,the structural features of the five outstanding high school English reading classes are consistent.The same teaching phases of them are Class Beginning(CB),Lead-in(LI),Pre-reading(PRR),While-reading(WR),Postreading(PR),Summary(SU)and Finish(FI),of which WR and PR are two teaching phases that occupy the most teaching time.In addition,the teaching content generally has moderate difficulty;The relationship between teachers and students is harmonious;The classroom atmosphere is active;PPT is used to assist teaching in each class.Secondly,the five classes all show obvious multimodal features,including auditory modes,visual modes,and environmental modes.There is a certain consistency in the overall usage and distribution features in different teaching phases of different modes.For example,all of the five teachers use fall intonation the most;all of them pay attention to the use of gestures,mainly deictic gestures and beat gestures;all of them scan all students or gaze at one student in the most time;all of them keep informal distance from students during most of the teaching process;all of them use various modes in LI,WR,and PR periods,etc.Thirdly,in different contexts,the relations between teacher’s pure spoken language and other modes are complex and diverse.Complementary relations embody reinforced ones including foregrounding,subordination and extension and non-reinforced ones including coordination;non-complementary relations include redundancy and part & whole.In addition,teachers use different modes to cooperate and realize the three meta-functions: ideational function,interpersonal function and textual function.Among them,visual modes can construct the three kinds of meaning that corresponding to the three meta-functions,namely,representational meaning,interactive meaning and compositional meaning.Representational meaning is mainly realized through narrative representation,in which teachers use gestures,motions,gazes and so on to form vectors.The realization of interactive meaning is related to four key factors,including distance,contact,perspective and modality,in which gazes,proxemics,pure language,paralanguage are involved.The realization of compositional meaning is related to information value,salience and framing,in which PPT modes are involved.These visual modes interact with auditory modes and environmental modes to achieve the three meta-functions together.Based on the above findings,this thesis brings the following implications to high school English teaching: first,teachers should emphasize the use of different modes besides spoken language in teaching process.Second,teachers should learn more knowledge about multimodal teaching and improve the skills of multimodal teaching.Third,teachers should use various modes to achieve meaning in a flexible way based on different teaching contents and teaching purposes.Fourth,it is necessary for teachers to cultivate students’ ability of recognizing and understanding multimodal discourse.