Teacher's “Speech” and “Action” in Classroom——A Multimodal Analysis of a College English Intensive Reading Class

This research takes a case study approach to make a multimodal analysis of a college English teacher's intensive English class.The objective is to explore what scaffolding functions the teacher's nonverbal behaviors serve and how language and actions complement each other in fulfilling the scaffolding functions.The findings indicate that the teacher's nonverbal behaviors such as gesture, facial expressions, posture and movement in the classroom mainly serve affective scaffolding functions and the teacher we observe can make good use of different scaffolding functions of language and action to serve both pedagogical and social functions.