Reading text itself can be considered as a multimodal material and to teach reading, reading material need to be thoroughly analyzed. Nowadays many teachers in reading class will apply different teaching methods some of which can be seen as a multimodal approach. 

However, consciously and actively designing a multimodal teaching approach for reading class is rare. By conducting a MDA towards the reading material, the research aims to find out the meaning that conveyed by different elements in reading texts. Meanwhile, a MDA towards the open class will focus on if the teacher’s teaching fits a multimodal approach and then figure out how the teacher’s various acts in class contribute to better understanding of reading text. Therefore, with the analysis of the reading material and an open reading class, author hopes to provide the benefits of a multimodal teaching approach. Then the research aims to encourage teachers consciously apply multimodal approach in analysis reading text as well as in real reading teaching. Moreover, some implications for MDA in other types of English teaching class will be proposed to make English teaching more efficiently.

1.3 Structure of the study

This study is mainly constructed with five different parts. In the first part, the author briefly introduces the emergence of modality as well as MDA and its importance in teaching. Meanwhile part 1 provides an overall framing as well as the structure of the study.

In the second part, author presents a review of different researches related to multimodality and MDA. in this chapter, author collects and organizes the definition of modality and MDA, the application of MDA in China and abroad. 

The third part is about the research method for this study. Based on the MDA structure from functional grammar view, the author chooses one of the analysis aspects for the research. Meanwhile, the structure from visual grammar is presented for the analysis of images.

Fourth part presents the analysis of the reading material and the open reading class. After the analysis, author discuss about different modalities in the two raw materials and how they perform their functions in different discourses. 

The last part gives a summary of the whole study and the major findings. In addition, the limitations of the study and the implications for the future study are also presented.