Research on Speech-associated Gesture in Chinese College Students' English PPT Presentation Based on Multimodal Theory

摘要

Multimodal discourse analysis has been adopted in many researches to analyze the oral language data and is also employed to investigate non-verbal communication. Based on multimodal discourse analysis theory, this research is intended to conduct an empirical research to investigate the hand gestures used by ESL leaners in PowerPoint presentation in English classroom. Through analysis, it is found that the special training lessons can improve students' practical ability to use hand gestures in PPT presentation. However, the general quality of oral output is found to be affected by the subjects' low diversity of gestures and insufficiency of integrating various modalities together in speech. At the end of the paper, some suggestions for English teaching are proposed on how the findings can be applied to the oral English teaching in China.