ABSTRACT
The importance of reading has been greatly emphasized in English classes, as
reading not only serves as a necessary source for students to gain knowledge and
acquire information, but also acts as one of the most significant criteria to evaluate one’s
language proficiency. As the product of the remarkable development of the multimedia,
multimodality discourse analysis has a great impact on the teaching practice.
Multimodal teaching could not only improve students’ reading ability, but also enhance
their understanding of autonomous and cooperative learning.
Metafunction systems could provide solid theoretical foundation for multimodal
teaching. In English classes, the interaction of semiotic resources can help to construct
ideational meaning, present interpersonal meaning, and realize textual meaning. Under
the framework of metafunction systems, students can construct meaning and gain
knowledge through the interaction of semiotic resources. In the meanwhile, teachers can
achieve their teaching objectives as well. Given the limited amount of research on the
multimodal teaching, the study gives a specific description of multimodal teaching of
reading under the framework of metafunction systems.
The study aims to explore how the multimodal teaching is conducted under the
framework of metafunction systems, and how to select and integrate the modalities to
achieve the teaching goals effectively. Therefore, the researcher has conducted the
multimodal teaching of reading with students of Class 3, Grade 2 in Nanjing NO.13
Senior Middle School for a semester. Based on the metafunction systems, the researcher
selects and integrates modalities, and designs the teaching phases. In this research, the
quantitative and qualitative approach are adopted to analyze, and explain the results of
tests, questionnaires, and interviews for the purpose of further learning about the effect
of multimodal teaching and providing suggestions for multimodal classes. After
finishing the experiment, the researcher concludes that teachers should select and
integrate modalities on the basis of teaching objectives, in order to realize the greatest
effect of multimodal teaching and improve students’ reading ability. Moreover, the
multimodal teaching arouses students’ interest in reading, and promotes them to take an
active part in class activities, as it provides a creative learning method with multi-
dimensional, and multi-sensory stimulation for them. What’s more, through the class
activities in the multimodal teaching, students’ learning input and output are effectively
and efficiently enhanced.
This research makes contributions to both theory and teaching practice.
Theoretically, it analyzes the reading text under the guidance of metafunction systems,
which provides a guideline for the multimodal teaching of reading. As far as the
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