Part 1 Introduction
1.1The Source of the Title
To sum up, promotion and establishment of a network-based multimedia teachingmode is an inevitable trend, but also has a very deep meaning. Such change is notjust teaching paradigm shift caused by the use of multimedia technology in teachingmethods to meet the development of higher education, and more importantly, itsparked a revolution in teaching concept. It has changed the long-term traditionalteacher-centered teaching mode, simply imparting language skills, and began toestablish a student-centered active and inpidualized teaching. Through comparativestudy we anticipate finding effective methods to reach our goal, to make a greatcontribution to College English Teaching and can be beneficial to other colleges anduniversities. According to College English Curriculum Requirements (2007), the objective ofcollege English teaching is to cultivate students’ all-round ability to use English andenable them to communicate effectively in their future work or social interaction toadapt to social development and international communication. So it requires thatteachers should explore new teaching methods which are suitable for our country’sconcrete circumstances. The development of information technology promotes communication media, which gives rise to the shift of the mode evolution ofexpression from monomodal texts to multimodal ones. After reading a lot of booksand papers, the author developed special interest in the multimodality. Then mysupervisor, Professor Ma recommends me some works about multimodal teaching.After searching many materials, the title of the paper is decided as “A study onCollege English Multimodal Teaching”.
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1.2The Theoretical and Practical Significance of the Study
Multimodality involves knowledge in the field of social semiotics, cognitivepsychology and second language acquisition. So the research in it can broaden studyin related subjects, and enrich knowledge in related fields. The research result can beapplied to improve students’ integrated ability and output of English. It can alsofoster students with high quality and international competitive ability. What’s more,the study can offer important referential meaning for college English multimodalteaching.After entering the new century, English as an international language andcommunication tool plays a more and more important role. On the basis ofmultimodal teaching, the study tries to bring multimodal teaching research resultsinto college English classes. In practice, the study can guide college English teachingreform, improve teaching quality and efficiency, promote teachers’ self-enhancementand professionalization, and push forward further development of college Englishcourse reform. At present, the integrated study between multimodality and languageteaching is at beginning stage. There are not so many domestic researchers, and theirstudies put more emphasis on theoretical discussion, empirical research is to bestrengthened. The study tries to make up the deficiency, use teaching cases to enrichpractical experience, and put forward pertinent suggestions for college Englishteaching, which will provide practical significance for college English teachingreform.
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Part 2 Literature Review and Theoretical Framework
2.1 Literature Review
Related literature is reviewed here. It consists of three parts. The first part beginswith the definition of multimodality. The second part presents previous researches onmultimodality abroad. The third part presents previous researches on multimodalityat home. Multimodality is a term widely discussed by linguists and semioticians in recentyears in the social semiotic fields in western countries. Linguists and semioticiansoften define it as follows:Van Leeuwen(2005:281) defines multimodality as “the combination of differentsemiotic modes-for example, language and music-in a communicative artifact orevent”.Baldry & Thibault (2006:21) defines multimodality as “the perse ways in which anumber of distinct semiotic resource systems are both co-deployed andco-contextualized in the making of a text-specific meaning”.Machin (2007: ix-x) defines multimodality as “the grammar of visual communication that is used by image designers. It is an analysis of the rules andprinciple that allows viewers to understand the meaning potential of the relativeplacement of elements, framing, salience, proximity, color saturations, styles oftypeface, etc”.The term multimodality draws attention to the many material resources beyondspeech and writing which societies have shaped and which cultures provide as meansfor making meaning. Modes are socially made and culturally availablematerial-semiotic resources for representation. Multimodality attends to thedistinctive affordances of different modes. In itself, it is not a theory, even though itsexplicit challenge to the central ‘place’ of language has profound implications forthinking about meaning, representation, communication. Multimodality poses achallenge to the long-held and still widely dominant notion that ‘language’ is thatresource for making meaning which makes possible the ‘expression’ of all thoughts,experiences, feelings, values, attitudes. In short, language as the pillar whichguarantees human rationality – a view which has up to now guaranteed it a privilegedplace in environments of teaching and learning.
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2.2 Theoretical Framework
The theoretical framework of the paper is concerned with Halliday’s systemicfunctional grammar and Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual grammar. The concept of “Metafunction” has a special significance on systemic functionalgrammar. M.A.K.Halliday recognizes that language is a tool of human socialinteraction, is a product of social activities, the function of the language in thehuman social interaction has determined its nature. Halliday (1994) insists “thegrammar of a language is not a code, not a set of rules for producing correctsentences, but a resource for making meanings”. According to Halliday, there arethree metafunctions in language, namely the ideational metafunction, theinterpersonal metafunction and the textual metafuntion. These three highly abstractmetafunctions form three aspects of the semantic layer where each internalmetafunction can be further pided into several semantic subsystems. Eachsubsystem includes a semantic function to characterize the role of severalcomponents. In Systemic Functional Grammar system, the three metafunctions areregarded as the foundation of meaning generation and understanding. They linkspecific meaning with the corresponding expression together.
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Part 3 Method....... 27
3.1 Introduction ....... 27
3.2 Design ........ 27
3.3 Procedure.... 30
Part 4 Results........ 39
4.1 Introduction ....... 39
4.2 Results of Test .......... 39
4.3 Results of Questionnaire ........ 44
Part 5 Discussion ......... 47
5.1 Introduction ....... 47
5.2 The Effect of Experiment ....... 47
5.3 The Effect of Multimodal Teaching ..... 50
5.4 Advantages of Multimodal Teaching over Traditional Teaching .......... 61
5.5 Summary .... 63
Part 5 Discussion
5.1 Introduction
This part is the core part of the paper. First, it discusses effects of the experiment. Inthe experiment, there are altogether nine phrases. What modalities every phrase usesand what the effect of every modality is are analyzed in detail. Then it analyses theeffect of multimodal teaching on listening, speaking, reading, writing and translatingrespectively. Finally, it probes into the advantages of multimodal teaching overtraditional teaching methods. In every phase of the experiment, the teacher made use of different multimodal signs.Different signs can bring different effects.In Phrase One, the major modality is audio modality. The teacher use clear andformal voice to begin the class. This kind of communication is helpful to reduce thedistance between the teacher and the students. And visual modality plays a minorrole, the teacher’s facial expressions and gestures serve as another important aspectof teacher's multimodality.In Phrase Two, visual modality is dominating. The content of PPT is vividlypresented by different word color and size. Some important information is eitherbold or italic, which makes students have easy access to information. At the sametime, audio modality plays a secondary role. The teacher uses her voice to give moreinstruction.
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Conclusion
Multimodal literacy indicates that people understand various kinds of media andmodalities while communicating, and after comprehension they form newinformation and then they can conduct a reverse communication. In multimodalteaching, not only should students understand and are familiar with grammaticalmeaning of every modality, such as visual grammar, audio grammar and tactilegrammar; but also make students proficient in utilizing and selecting reasonablemodality to deliver and exchange information. Above all, at extracurricular onlineautonomous learning, it is necessary for students to expertly make use of multimediaand network to conduct creative learning, combining frequently-used modality toachieve the best learning effects. The development of modern multimedia technology is a basic concept of amultimodal communication that allows the recipient to obtain information through amulti-channel. It is easier than single modality making the hearer to understand andremember. Therefore, in multimodal teaching teachers must first raise the level ofuse of multimedia technology, including the producing and explaining the electroniccourseware. Second, teachers in the classroom but also make a reasonable choice ofmedia and modality, which media and modes can be accepted by students viaquestionnaires and teaching practices, and which combination of media and modalitycan obtain much better practical teaching. Use of multimedia must be fully satisfiedand served for text content and teaching objectives, as some contents and subjectmatter are not suitable for using multimedia.
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References (omitted)