Table 5 : after-reading teaching process 11

 1. Introduction

1.1 Research background

Reading teaching has always been one of the key factors in English teaching. Written text is main language resource in a reading class, which is also the major focusing point. For decades of reading teaching, reading text conveys major meaning of the passage and thus teachers spend much time on decoding the text and then students can get the meaning of the text. However, since the English teaching standard has changed. Images now play an important role in reading text, though images were thought to be marginal. Furthermore, even the text itself has changed that there are different colored sentences, various fonts and different sizes. All these changes force teachers to teach not only the text but also to also concentrate on other the elements of the passage, which means decoding the written text is not enough in reading class. 

With the development of modern technology and the added elements of reading text, teacher’s acts in reading class are expanded. Not only the written text but also technological mediums, such as PPT, video, pictures or recordings, teacher’s actions and body movements help construct the meaning of the reading passage. Thus, the communication ways in a reading class become multimodal and it requires students to listen, speak, look or even touch in reading class so that students can be more interested in reading class. 

The concept of discourse analysis put forward by Harris has been applied in different fields for deeply decoding the meaning of different types of discourse. However, the traditional discourse analysis mainly focuses on single source of language (胡雯 2011). Multimodal communication becomes the main trend of information exchange, one cannot fully understand the meaning by only looking at single source (韦琴红   2008). Since the written texts are no longer densely placed which means there are many other elements especially pictures put along with texts, discourse analysis focusing on written text is not appropriate (Theo van Leeuwen, 1992). Nonverbal signs play a more and more important role in conveying and expressing meanings, which includes images, teacher’s movements, color, music etc. As a result, the traditional discourse analysis for single source is not enough for the present reading text and reading class and thus the multimodality discourse analysis (MDA) is developed. Traditional discourse analysis in reading class focuses on written text of teacher’s talk in class while MDA aims to bring both verbal and nonverbal elements into a discourse analysis structure. 

1.2 Significance and aims of the research

Reading class in English teaching is important but it is harder to attract students’ interest in reading class than in oral and listening class. However, literacy is a critical ability for EFL students and it is necessary to develop students’ literacy through reading class. Traditional reading class mainly focused on verbal elements and ignored nonverbal elements thus led to a low literacy of students (王惠萍 2008). Nowadays, textbook as well as teaching tools for reading class has more and more nonverbal elements and to cultivate a better literacy for students, teachers should help students understand the meaning conveyed by these elements such as pictures. 

Reading teaching needs not only teacher’s talk and written language but also need a multimodal teaching method meaning to teach with various tools and mediums. By doing so, reading teaching can expand channels for students to get meanings of a reading text. Therefore, providing a multimodality discourse analysis towards a reading class and multimodal reading text can help understand the benefits of a multimodal approach in reading teaching and meanwhile making the class more interested thus students can be more involved.