Abstract

The concept of multimodality discourse analysis has been applied in various fields, English education being one of them. Multi-literacy ability becomes one of the important English abilities and reading teaching is one way for cultivating students’ multi-literacy ability. Based on Halliday’s functional grammar, a proper multimodality discourse analysis structure with five levels is proposed. This study provides an analysis for two multimodal discourses from the level of content. The study first presents a case analysis towards reading material and then explains how modalities contribute to meaning construction. Then a similar analysis is done for an open reading class of the material. By analyzing the functions of different modality, the study shows that choosing different modalities in class teaching makes the class efficient. Also the study points out that properly applying a multimodal teaching approach provides benefits for both teacher and students.

Keywords: multimodality; multimodality discourse analysis; reading teaching

Contents

Abstract

摘  要

1. Introduction-1

1.1 Research background-1

1.2 Significance and aims of the research-1

1.3 Structure of the study-2

2. Literature review-4

2.1 Definition of Multimodality-4

2.2 Multimodality discourse analysis-4

2.3 Related previous work on MDA at home and abroad-5

3. Research methods-7

4. Discussions-8

4.1 Analysis of the reading material-8

4.2 Analysis of the reading lesson-9

5. Conclusion-13

5.1 Summary of the study-13

5.2 Pedagogical implications-13

5.3 Limitations of the study and further research-14

References-15

Appendix-16