A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Second Language Instruction Videos

As the internet and education technologies boom, second language teaching has been witnessing profound changes. The second language instruction video is one of the changes mentioned. This paper aims to construct a framework to study the instruction videos based on the Visual Grammar Theory of Social Semiotics and Power Distance theory and then applies this framework to the analysis of prize-winning instruction videos in China, so as to find out the features in narration, representational meaning, interactive meaning, compositional meaning and the ideology behind the videos. The significance of this study is twofold, one is to illustrate that video analysis should be done with reference to cultural theories and an analytical framework should be built according to a specific genre. The other is to discuss how to effectively build the identity of teachers in the digital era, and provide some suggestions for future police discourse practice.