Multimodal discourse refers to applying auditory sense, tactile sense, and other senses through various means and symbolic resources such as language, images, sounds, and actions to communicate.

the definition of teacher talk/ discourse

Nowadays in school English reading teaching, many teachers still focus on improving students’ performance in examinations. Their teaching is limited to the standard of exam-oriented education. Although they would teach students how to comprehend the text in classes, they only talk monotonously in order to save time and output more knowledge without considering students’ feedback. Under such a boring and toneless teaching model, students' enthusiasm for learning English would gradually decrease.

In the middle school textbook, there are lots of interesting pictures or dialogues. But many teachers often ignore these modules which can arouse students' interest in English reading. And they only briefly explain the seemingly “important” words and grammar points in the articles. The mono-talk teachers’ discourse model ignores the background information in the textbook, which would greatly weaken the impact of the new textbook on students and weaken students’ interest in English reading.

classes with effective teachers’ discourse

Compared with the traditional teacher mono-talk teaching model, multimodal teaching methods and teachers’ discourse have a good influence on students’ English learning. They can work together to overcome the drawbacks of the traditional mono-talk teaching mode. The abundant and various discourse inputs combined with multiple symbol modes can stimulate the learner’s learning interest and consolidate their memory of the teaching content. This kind of teaching mode classroom can provide a relatively realistic teaching environment, which can effectively enhance the learner's reading ability and comprehensive comprehension ability.

a comparison between mono-talk and multi-model discourse

The mono-talk teachers’ discourse has shown many drawbacks in high school English reading teaching practice. First, mono-talk teachers’ discourse lacks interactivity. In the traditional mono-talk modality, teachers’ discourse focuses on transferring the knowledge. But it inevitably would make learners misunderstand the goal of learning English and mistakenly think that the criterion for success is the score of the test. Constructivism learning theory believes that learning is a proactively autonomous process which is closely related to situations and interactions. This requires teachers to apply multimodal teachers’ discourse in their classes to lead students to learn English actively. In this way, we can strengthen students' general perception and comprehension of the reading text.

Second, the mono-talk teachers’ discourse mode is lack of interestingness. The edutainment teaching method has always been advocated in our English teaching. By creating different lively and diverting situations, teachers lead students to join in and integrate into the classroom environment more quickly. At the same time, students' language application ability could be enhanced through practicing what they learned in the authentic class environment. And their critical thinking skills and comprehensive ability can be improved imperceptibly.

Moreover, the mono-talk modal classroom is short of situationality. A classroom with pure verbal teacher talk cannot successfully construct lively and effective situations. In order to truly realize the student-centered English classroom, the teacher's discourse must synchronize the development of multimedia technology. Teachers should take the actual needs of students into consideration and provide students with a more vivid, realistic, contextualized English teaching environment.

To sum up, Multimodal teachers’ discourse can effectively improve the interactivity, interestingness, and situationality of English reading classes.

Author | Wang, Lin from Secondary School